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) LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



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THE WORKS OF 



BENJ. F. TAYLOR, LL.D. 



SONGS OF TESTEBDAT. Illustrated. With 
handsomely ornamented cover in black and gold. 
Octavo, silk Cloth and full gilt edges $3 00 

OLD TIME riCTUMES and Sheaves of 
Mhyme. Illustrated. Small quarto, Silk cloth.. 150 

PICTURES OF LIFE JA^ CAMP AND 

FIELD. 12mo, cloth 1 50 

THE WORLD ON WHEELS, and otJier 

Sketches. Illustrated. 12mo, cloth 150 

SETWEEN THE GATES. 12mo, cloth 1 50 

SUMMER-SAVORY, Gleaned from Rural 

Nooks in Pleasant Weather. 12mo, cloth.. 1 00 



SUMMER-SAYORY, 



GLEANED T^ROM RURAL NOOKS 



m PLEASANT WEATHER. 



BY 

BENJ. F. TAYLOR, LL.D., 

Author or "The World on Wheels," "Between the Gates, 
"Songs op Yesterday," etc, 



^'^ or ^l^r:^\\v^^<' 



CHICAGO: 
S. C. GRIGGS AND COMPANY. 

1879. 






0^% 



COPTRIGHT, 1879, 

By S. C. GRIGGS AND COMPANY. 



piKHIGHT iit LEOKARD I 



DONOHUE & HENNEBERRY, BINDERS, CHICAGO. 



TO 

S. O. GrRIGrGS, ESQ., 

MY FRIEND OF "ALWAYS," 

WHOSE IMPRINT HAS ADORNED MY BOOKS FROM 
FIRST TO LAST, 

THIS RAMBLING RECORD IS CORDIALLY 

INSCRIBED. 



"ON THE STILE." 

Sage, Caraway, Summer-Savory, and Dill, are four 
aromatic memories of the old fire-side and garden- 
side. They suggest the fragrant little trifles that 
enrich life beyond silver and gold. They are good, 
winter and summer. 

For these records of gypsy-like rambles in sunny 
days I have picked a leaf from the garden border 
close to the hollyhocks, and chosen a name — Sdmmek- 
Savoey. Let us hope the next leaf gathered will not 
be from among the poppies. That's for forgetfulness. 

It is an art to set back the old clock and be a 
child again. Imagination can easily see the boy a 
man, but how hard for it to see the man a child ; 
and whoever learns to glide back into that rosy time 
when he did not know that thorns are under the 
roses, or that clouds will return after the rain; when 
he thought a tear can no more stain a cheek than a 
drop of rain a flower; when he fancied life had no 
disguises, and hope no blight at all, has come as near 
as anybody in the world to discovering the North- 
west Passage to an earthly Paradise. 



co]^te:nts. 



I. "A Heated Term" . _ . _ 7 

II. Glimpses of Utah - - - _ I6 

III. Pictures of Colorado - - - - 31 

IV. "Ye Crags and Peaks" - - - 37 
V. "The Garden of the Gods" - - 46 

VI. Hats 51 

VII. The Men of Grooves - - - - 55 

VIII. The North Woods - - . - 66 

IX. Funeral Extravagance - - - 78 

X. "Mine Inn" 86 

XI. The Caravan 98 

XII. Excursions 106 

XIII. The "North Woods" Meeting-House- 112 

XIV. Winks and Winkers _ . . ng 
XV. Human Figs 121 

XVI. "The Hill of Science" - - - 127 



6 CONTENTS. 

XVII. The Country "Ooeners" . - - 134 

XVIII. Aquarius the Water-bearer - - 144 

XIX. Hill Cousins - - - - - 150 

'^XX. Jaw 162 

XXI. Just and Generous - - - - 166 

XXII. Stitching Landscapes - - - 173 

XXIII. The Country Ball-room - - - 181 

XXIV. A Thanksgiving Day Flight - 187 
XXV. "Kiverside" and "Lakeside" - - 198 

XXVI. Checks 206 



SUMMER-SAVORY, 

GLEANED FROM RURAL NOOKS IN PLEASANT WEATHER. 



OHAPTEE 1. 

"A HEATED TERM." 

THE world is out of sight. The high tides of 
midsummer have rolled over it. The green vol- 
umes of the maples, the tumbling fountains of the 
willows, the pensile spray of the elms, the golden 
calms of the ripe grain, the chopping seas of tlie 
swath-ridged meadows, have submerged and washed 
our brown planet quite away. The armed squadrons 
of corn are marching to the tune of 100° in the shade. 
They have whipped out all their swords and thrown 
away the scabbards. Their green knapsacks are grow- 
ing plump with rations of samp, hasty-pudding and 
Indian bread. The sweet whispers of the lilacs, tell- 
ing of days that are no more, have died out of the 
year of grace. The first flush of June roses has faded, 
the first love-songs of birds have been sung, the broad 
zone of the matron has succeeded to the slender sash 
of the maid, and the year is marching on. It is a 
splendid tramp, besides being a trump. The white 
star-blossom of the strawberry has heralded the sweet 

7 



8 SUMMER-SAVORY. 

red Mars of the ripened fruit — the star is a pleiad and 
the planet has — gone down! There is a faint smell 
of new apples in the air, that is better than gales from 
Araby the Blest. There is a suspicion of caraway, 
and a hint of dill, and a breath from the red clover. 
Nature is rich in compensations, and her losses and 
her gains are paired like the embarking menagerie of 
the first Admiral, when the Ark put to sea with the 
greatest and only show on earth, bound for Ararat and 
a market. 

The lights and shades of the year touch and tint 
and change everything but the English sparrow, — that 
goes right on with its saucy talk and its perpetual 
fight and its ceaseless paternosters of beaded eggs the 
year round. Snow or glow, zephyr or northeaster, it 
is all the same. What a pugnacious, aggressive ounce 
of British bird it is ! It routs our robins and perse- 
cutes our goldfinches, and the gypsy baskets of the 
orioles swing empty. Oh, for another Bunker Hill ! 
And yet some cry, Spare, oh, the sparrow! 

100°. 

I have been seeking a cool place. The ambition of 
the mercury wearies me. The thought of Dr. Kane's 
chronometer, that was so cold it hurned him, is no 
comfort. Even the " Exiles of Siberia " are selfish as 
oysters. There they are to-day, comfortably freezing 
their feet, and do not offer us so much as a chill of a 
chance to frost a finger. The little arrow that swings 
from the top of the barn seems to be welded to the 



"A HEATED TERM." 9 

spire by the solar force, and to be drawing fire with 
its barbed point out of the fierce south. The leaves 
of a tree bj my window curl in the sun, as if they 
were trying to get back into the bud again, and be 
cozy and cool as they were when the world M^ent 
Maying. 

The robins sit on the cherry-tree with bills apart 
like a Y, and their wings at trail arms. I can almost 
detect the smell of burned feathers. A match on the 
window-sill sets off' of its own accord, and commits 
suicide to get out of its misery. 

Lawyers' clients grow irritable, and desire to 
"sue" somebody right away, and talk in a salaman- 
derish style about making the defendant "sweat." 
Doctors' patients languish and wilt. Heat expands 
most things but sermons, — they shrink from an hour 
to twenty minutes, and sometimes the preachers 
themselves are scorched out of their pulpits, and 
flee to the mountains and the islands of the sea. 
Some cynic has growled because clergymen take a 
vacation in summer, and sneered with an unanswer- 
able air, "Are not immortal souls as precious in dog- 
days as in December?" As if, with thermometers 
at a hundred in the shade, a preacher cannot safely 
leave his flock so long as he leaves the orthodox 
suggestion behind him, and does not take the hot 
weather away with him. 

But ice-men, dragon-flies and sun-flowers are hap- 
py, and never was a day so torrid that a soda-fountain 
was unable to play. Yes, and scarlet geraniums ! 



10 SUMMER-SAVORY. 

There is one of them now, bolt-upright in an iron 
vase painted a comfortable color to warm yon up 
just by looking at it, standing out in "the burden 
and heat of the day," and hot enough to take a 
helpless egg beyond the third week of incubation, and 
a minute or two toward the boiling-point of "eggs 
rare." That geranium has fairly taken fire with its 
scarlet flowers, and flares as happy as a torch in a 
triumphal procession. 

People are never so like one another as in a heated 
term. They get melted down into a homogeneous 
mass of humanity. Had I written it "we^s" it would 
have been no matter. Their angularities are fused off. 
They cease to be original. They say, ^''Isn't it hot ! " 
They blow a ghost of a whistle without any hody to 
it. They say, " whew ! " Their collars droop like a 
hound's ears. They expand into broad-brimmed hats. 
They blossom out with umbrellas. They festina 
lente. 

The clouds come up every day, and lay their 
rugged heads on the rim of the horizon, and watch 
the landscape to see if it is done brown or done to 
a turn ; but it isn't, and so those drowsy heads sink 
back, and leave the sky all clear for the setting sun 
to give us a parting roast at short i-ange. How the 
brick walls throb and the stone pavements dance with 
caloric ! And the earth turns over and over and fails 
to find a cool side. We feel the sun as it fires the 
east windows, and grills the roof, and sits down on 
every shingle, and scorches the front room, and cooks 



"A HEATED TERM." 11 

the west room, and toasts the veranda, and bakes the 
walls till they begin to be as much at home as they 
ever were in the brick-kiln. 

And we are all the while watching for wind. A 
poplar lifts an ear of a leaf as if it heard something, 
and we take courage, but nothing comes of it. As 
a rule, the wind is always blowing somewhere else in 
sultry weather. If you happen to have no south 
window, there is just where it swings a vine or sways 
a tree. There is quite a breeze in the next town, and 
a gale in the adjoining county, possibly a tornado, but 
with you it is as calm as the Sea of Galilee. Fans? 
To be sure — but then if you have got to work them, 
you prefer to wait till cool weather for it. Fourth-of- 
July orations and fans are alike : windy but not ex- 
hilarating, and very fatiguing withal. Wasps, as if 
black rapiers should take wing, dart through the open 
window like shuttles through a loom. You dodge 
every red tongue with a dog to it, lest the attach- 
ment has grown mad with heat. You hunt for a 
cabbage-leaf for your hat lest you be sun-struck, and 
you grow such an absorbent of water that the leaf is 
about as much at home as if you were a cabbage 
yourself. 

The sun has such a habit of rising that it cannot 
avoid it, and it comes up clear and red in the latter 
part of every night. If it could only spend an autumn 
or two in Indiana, and get " the chills," and have an 
intermittent fever, instead of the steady, unwinking 
blaze ! 



12 SUMMER-SAVORY. 

Peeled like an onion, to get as near as possible to 
the carbonate of lime without becoming an outright 
anatomy, I have been trying to write ! My face and 
hands beaded with sweat like a savage's wampum; a 
sudorific, saline stream trickling down the pen, and 
diluting the ink and pickling the words, and making 
the wet paper as pleasant to write upon as a jelly-fish, 
and as appetizing to sheep as a salt-lick, I have been 
trying to scollop off a remembered sky with tlie silver 
edges of Colorado mountains, and give my i-eader a 
Sabbath-day's journey toward the Utah Canaan, and 
bid him see the great white visible throne of Pike's 
Peak through the red gateway of the Garden of the 
Gods. 

Had my memories been a kid, and a mess of pot- 
tage exactly the dish to serve up on a page, it would 
have been brought on, piping hot from the seething 
kettle of the heated term. But when a man's pen 
can get about hot enough in the sun to brand a mule, 
it is time he plunged it into the trough with the 
blacksmith's tongs, and got the owner of the iron 
fingers to give him a few blasts from the bellows. 

And so the glowing days burned on. The elms 
stood about as dusty as elephants and supple as sled- 
stakes. The air grew murky, and Fancy limped as if 
it had lost a foot. It was like holding the scythe and 
turning the grindstone too. Shadrach could not have 
lived in the third story of the house without a miracle. 
Meshach would not have despised the second, and 
Abednego would have remembered the fiery furnace 



"A HEATED TERM." 13 

had he gone to bed in the first. The building had 
become warmed down through. It was three layers 
of torrid zone. 

And then I rose betimes, and, satchel in hand, 
climbed a huge green hill, and found welcome in a 
great roomy house that opened its hospitable doors 
to the four quarters and the thirty-two winds of 
heaven; and the city was under my feet, the beautiful 
city of Syracuse, salted and seasoned, and warranted 
to keep in any climate. And the winds came from 
the southwest and laid cool hands upon my brow, and 
I sat down upon a granite door-step as cold as Ponto's 
nose, while behold, the marble mantels in the city had 
been warm as a slab of new gingerbread. And the 
rippling grain had a cool look, and the timothy smelled 
sweet in the sun, and the shadow of the great house 
fell upon the ground like a home-made twilight, and 
the blessed winds came and went, and the grass gave 
to the feet like a king's carpet. 

Then the fleecy flocks of the Lord came trooping 
over the unfenced edge of the western horizon, and 
we saw them long before the city below knew they 
were coming at all, and we wondered how they 
would wonder, and we rejoiced for them beforehand. 
And when the flocks were all in the home pasture 
over the city, the smooth wall of a blue slate-stone 
quarry showed along the west, and out of it, as if 
there had been a door, came a troop of breezy shep- 
herds ; and the flocks were stampeded across the 
whole visible heaven, with the cracking of great 



14 SUMMER-SAVORY. 

whips and the flicker of torches; and the roof of the 
great house roared with the wind and the rain, like 
a drum-corps sixty men strong, and the slanting rat- 
lins of the storm were drawn taut through the air 
from heaven even down to the earth, and denser than 
you ever saw them in a ship's rigging ; and the bowed 
trees wrapped all their leaves about them as if they 
had been cloaks ; and the grains and grasses bent 
low to keep oat of the storm, and the pansies just 
stood and shook with their quaint and quiet laughter, 
and by-and-by the sun shone out, and lo, there is a 
new heaven and a new earth ! 

The city that was tawny as a lion shines green 
as an emerald. The smoky air is washed clean and 
cool. We breathe to the bottom of our lungs, with 
great respirations, as the parched yoke-bearers divert 
the route of the running brook into their dry and 
thirsty throats, with long drinks and great breaths 
of satisfaction between. The buttons of the vest 
worn a-flap and a-flare made for their holes like 
prairie-dogs; the coat that had been about as intol- 
erable as the shirt of l^essus was donned with a 
sense of relief; and behold, I was "clothed and in 
ray right mind." And with a cool, dry hand, that 
only yesterday was as -w^handy a member to write 
with as a seal's flipper, I grasped the pen and said, 
" I will write off the salted rust of the sweat from my 
steel pen, as they scour a plowshare with a few 
bouts in the fallow ; I will record the glowing mem- 
ories of the days and nights of capsicum and cay- 



"A HEATED TERM." 15 

enne; and my gratitude for the green hill and the 
free winds, and the splendid rain that swept the val- 
ley of Onondaga with its royal skirts, when the rush 
and tumult of the storm and the bewildered and be- 
clouded sky made it the fairest day in the calendar 
of a long fortnight." 

What precious stuff it is they write who wish for 
their friends cloudless skies and gentle breezes and 
eternal sunshine! Who has not seen some fellow's 
sonnet to his girl of flesh and blood, imploring such 
tropical blessings upon her innocent head as could 
only be endured by phenixes, salamanders, and black- 
smiths' anvils! Let us have sense. 



OHAPTEE II. 

GLIMPSES OF UTAH. 

DID you ever see a man that had been scalped ? — 
not by the patriarch with his scythe, but by the 
savage with his knife? Well, it will not pay to see 
him, as a general thing, unless you have a bit of blue- 
closet curiosity about you, and almost everybody has. 
I know a lady who goes to every funeral she can hear 
of within a Sabbath-day's journey, and looks at the 
deceased and watches the mourners, and determines 
the depth and strength and probable length of their 
sorrow. She is about as sure to be at your funeral as 
she is to be at her own. 

But it gives you a queer sensation, and not M'ith- 
out a pleasant trace of horror in it, to sit beside a 
well-favored gentleman, with luxuriant hair showing 
around the edge of his cap, and think that a savage 
once had him in his clutch with a whoop, and swept 
a keen knife around his lifted locks with another 
whoop, and whirled the trophy aloft with more 
whoops, every atom as barbarously delighted as a 
fox-hunter when he flaunts poor Reynard's " brush," 
and sounds " the treble mort." It brings back the 
old border tales of the log-cabin times, you used to 
hear on winter nights, when you flung an eye over 

16 



GLIMPSES OF UTAH. 17 

your shoulder as tlie yarn ran off, lest Black Hawk 
or Red Jacket, or somebody smelling of moccasins, 
blankets, smoke and kinnikinic, should show a red- 
ochre visage at a green window-pane. 

That very pleasant gentleman is a conductor on 
the Central Pacific railroad, and beguiled the way 
for me as we steamed toward Ogden from the west. 
He ventured to a little stream two miles from a sta- 
tion for trout one day, and Chief-Justice Story's nat- 
ural nobleman surprised him, scalped him, and left 
him for dead. I knew all about it, but I had a mis- 
erable desire to hear him describe the capillary calam- 
ity, though I could not quite ask him a blunt ques- 
tion about " the rape of the lock." I mentioned 
savages, if perchance he might say he knew too much 
of them, and then gratify my curiosity, but he had 
apparently forgotten the circumstance. I spoke of 
narrow escapes in the wilderness, but he only 
scratched one ear with a thoughtful finger, and 
pointed out a rock with a nose and chin like Yol- 
taire's, and an eagle on a crag that looked as if he 
had been scalped, " Bald ? " I said ; " bald," he re- 
plied ; and that was as near as he ever got to the 
subject. 

It was a sunny morning when we drew up beside 
the depot at Ogden, where a hungry gong roared at 
us with a breath redolent of onion, cabbage, roast, 
fr}^ and stew, and a little bell made mouths at us and 
gave tongue, telling of "funeral-baked meats" all 
cold for lunches, and we accepted the invitation. 



18 SUMMER-SAVOEY. 

Fowls stiff and stark lay in piles, and so cerulean of 
breast, back and thigh, as to compel the inference that 
they belonged to the tribe of the Delawares, "Blue 
Hen's chickens" every egg of them all. The Wali- 
satch Mountains crowned with snow lift their thou- 
sands of feet of grandeur, and the Great Salt Lake 
stretches its glittering length for eighty miles, an un- 
inhabited waste of three ides, three urns and an ate, 
to wit: chlorides of sodium, magnesium, calcium, and 
a sulphate of soda. But they will keep, while un- 
happily the fowls were kept too long. At last the 
locomotive whistled us aboard the Utah Central train, 
bound for Salt Lake City, thirty-six miles to the 
south. The conductor was a Mormon ; also the en- 
gineer; likewise the brakeman. We looked curi- 
ously about for " signs " of the peculiar people. They 
were invisible. You might as well expect to catch a 
Baptist by baiting a trap with a water-tank as to de- 
tect the intelligent Mormon by any sanctimonious 
slides and cadences. 

There was but one Pharisee on the train, and I am 
sorry to say he believed in John Calvin. A Bible in 
his hand, displayed to show the "Rev. X. Y. Z."; a 
roll of sermon protruding like a revolver from his 
breast-pocket : his hair parted on the " divide " of 
philoprogenitiveness — what a septisyllable it is! — 
and brought up over his ears like two little bundles 
of oats thrust in the elbows of a couple of barn-braces, 
and about ripe ; the corners of his mouth curved down 
for pronouncing a " woe " upon somebody at sight ; a 



GLIMPSES OF UTAH. 19 

wrinkle to his nose, as if a rank offense saluted him 
as it smelled to heaven, — there he sat, making the ob- 
server positively bilious with depravity as he watched 
him. Begging his pardon, I asked him the name of 
a place we were nearing. He made an emphatic pause 
before he replied, and then, with a momentous look 
and a deliberate air, as if he fancied he had written 
the Decalogue and were promulgating it for the first 
time, he picked his way from word to word, as if they 
were stepping-stones across a brook, and said, "That 
— place — ah — is — called — ah — Kaysville ! " Fancy 
such a man moving you to do anything but get out of 
his reach, or persuading you to give anything but the 
cold shoulder! 

A stately gentleman in black, with a pleasant look 
and a fatherly way — and he proved to be exceedingly 
fatherly — and with wives enough for three bishops, 
attracts your attention. He may be a lawyer who has 
clients, or a doctor who has patients, or a clergyman 
who can sing "A Charge to Keep I Have," but you 
are sure he is a prominent member of society because 
of the spread of his vest, as if it were buttoned over 
the benighted and barbarous regions of an artificial 
globe. He looks as if he would give you a check for 
a million, and you could not prevent him from doing 
it if you tried. He is a Mormon preacher. He came 
through Emigration Canon when he was leaner. He 
saw this valley of abundance in the sage-brush and 
alkali period, before the soap-provoker had yielded to 
the roses of Sharon. 



20 SUMMER-SAVOEY. 

And the train is speeding along over the toes 
of the Wahsatch rugged range. The Great Salt 
Lake shines in the sun on the west. Evidences of 
fertility and abundance surround you, but it is a 
rugged, a sort of old Saxon abundance. There are 
beautiful places for beauty everywhere, but it has not 
risen to cultivated elegance. It is the garment with 
the selvedge on. Things are not square-cut and 
hemmed, but a little tag-locked and ragged at the 
edges. But there are no "lean years" in Utah. Had 
I visited this valley in 1847 I should have been in 
Mexico, but now I am in an outlying province of — 
Turkey. 

White patches of alkaline soil show here and there ; 
orchards dot the picture ; broad pastures freckled with 
great herds of sleek cattle unroll. Mount Nebo lifts 
its tall winter one hundred and twenty miles away. 
Fremont's Peak is fifteen miles to the right. The 
Mountain of Prophecy shows its dome to the north. 
"We are nearing the banks of the latter-day Jordan. 
The sharp gleam of the Lake, with its islands and its 
sea-gulls and its drift of clean salt, is as cooling to 
look at as the flash of a sword-blade. The rain here 
as in California is home-made. Utah goes by water. 

THE TABEENACLE. 

At last the gray roof of the Tabernacle shows 
above the trees. It is the half of a gigantic egg 
resting upon forty-six sandstone columns. Gentiles 
say it is " a had egg" Build a mental bird that could 



GLIMPSES OF UTAH. 21 

lay an egg two hundred and fifty feet long and one 
hundred and fifty wide ! It is the great egg of Utah. 
Between these pillars are windows and doors ; open 
them, and nothing is left but columns and roof. 

The streets of Salt Lake City are broad avenues 
lying square with the world, lined with beautiful 
trees, and bordered with streams of mountain water. 
Where in Christendom are the reeking gutters, in 
Mormondom are the clean, live brooks. But the 
streets were dusty, the winds were awake, and the 
mercury was lively. There are beautiful homes, there 
are adobe houses, there are many hives. 

Tt was Sunday, and we went to the Tabernacle. 
The great oval structure, sixty-five feet to the roof, 
was dressed in the gloomy pomp of mourning for the 
dead president, Brigham Young. Immense funeral 
wreaths depended from the ceiling. The great dais, 
raised tier above tier, was draped in black, and upon 
it were seated the Twelve, and the Elders and Bishops 
of the Church of Mormon. And they were an im- 
pressive and dignified body of men. John Taylor 
with his frosty crown ; Orson Pratt looking over the 
gray hedge of a mighty beard ; John Sharp, shrewd, 
angular and genial ; George Q. Cannon, clean-looking, 
amiable, and winning in his ways. He had a word 
to sa}'^ about tithes, and rallied up the stone-masons to 
work upon the new Temple. But you would suppose 
from the pleasant way he talked that he was not call- 
ing for ten per cent of back-ache, tug and trowel ; but 
explaining how every man could be his own doctor 



22 SUMMER-SAVOEY. 

or lawyer, or could get more money for eight hours' 
work than he could possibly earn in ten. Take the 
great Sanhedrim together, it looked legislative enough 
to be a Senate. The black background was dotted 
with white heads. There was now and then a bullet- 
head or a chuckle-head, but of the majority, some of 
them might have been Baptist deacons, or Methodist 
ministers, or Presbyterian dominies, or presidents of 
colleges. Behind them towered the great organ in its 
trappings of woe. Built where it stands, it rises like 
a castle, one of the great musical instruments of the 
world. The fine choir of adults clustered about its 
base looked like boys and girls, and when the mellow 
thunder of the deep bass rolled out, and all the birds 
and flutes locked up in it were let loose above the surf 
of sound, and the warble of the human voices came 
out in the lulls, it was very grand. 

But the master-spirit of the dais had abdicated. 
Brigham Young was not there. Coarse and strong, 
with wonderful executive powers, of an earnest and 
dogged purpose that never let go, a self-reliance that 
breasted storm and bearded wilderness, nothing if not 
resolute, knowing what men were fitted to his use, 
and building them in the wall of his design as a 
mason lays the stone, he brought the most heteroge- 
neous elements into harmony, taught a Babel of 
tongues to talk Mormon with one accord, left a bloom- 
ing garden where he found a wilderness that grew 
ghastly pale at its own desolation, founded the mid- 
continental city of America, and hastened the build- 



GLIMPSES OF UTAH. 23 

ing of the iron highway from Atlantic to Pacific a 
whole generation of men. 

THE PEOPLE. 

I hoped John Taylor would preach, but a nephew 
of Smith of the tribe of Joseph, who had been on a 
mission to Europe, cumbered the ground. A pale, 
lank-sided fanatic, who railed at the Gentiles with 
venomous bitterness as only a bloodless man can rail, 
and the fiercer he talked the paler he grew, till his 
waxen face, relieved upon the black drapery, gave the 
grotesque effect of a medallion-head escaping from 
the medal, becoming animate and angry, and bobbing 
about upon the jet velvet like the rolling eyeballs 
of Othello. 

But if Smith was not worth hearing, the great 
audience was a memorable sight. Fancy six thousand 
faces fitted into an ellipse that will seat eight thou- 
sand people, — a huge mosaic of human heads! There 
were at least a thousand children among them, sorted 
ofiT with picket-lines of mothers between, and about 
four-score infants in arms. It would have been an 
appetizing sight for Herod, and would have kept the 
baby-eating Saturn in rations for three months. Ev- 
ery style of dress was represented, from the old poke- 
bonnet with a puckered face in its back room to 
the wafer of a hat with a butterfly on it, and the 
lamp-mat trifle just caught on the bump of appro- 
bativeness behind. There was the old beaver chafed 
bare in spots, as if it had worked in harness some 



24 SUMMER-SAVOEY. 

time, and the new silk that shines like a bottle. 
There was the modern girl hnng about with two or 
three dresses of different lengths and divers colors, 
and curiously canght up with half-reefs here and there, 
as if a sailor had been taking in the top-hamper for 
a storm and got blown overboard in the act. There 
was the strait, scant skirt of the ancient girl collapsed 
about her form like a balloon witli the valve gone. 
Aggregate a hundred school-house and four-corners 
country audiences of thirty years ago, sprinkle in a 
few city people here and there, and you have an idea 
of that great congregation. 

You will look in vain for facial signs of utter 
misery. There are sad-eyed, weary-looking women, 
and so there are everywhere. You can pick out 
many a devout believer who came through the wil- 
derness of old. You can detect the honest doubters 
and the foxy professors and the sincere worshipers. 
Drawn largely from the laboring classes of Europe, 
any considerable intelligence and culture cannot be 
found in the rank and file, but it is an error to 
think this has not remarkable exceptions. There 
are astronomers and naturalists of no mean order; 
linguists that could grace a professor's chair in east- 
ern universities; men of general cultivation and large 
business ability, and women of refinement. 

But the children are a marvelous product. You 
ride along the beautiful avenues and see groups of 
them, neatly dressed and bright as quicksilver, play- 
ing in the shade. You meet clusters of Brigham 



GLIMPSES OF UTAH. 25 

Young's grandchildren ; yon encounter his sons and 
daughters. Every girl is half-sister to somebody, and 
a boy's father may be his uncle, and his mother own 
aunt to his half-brother. The ward schools swarm 
with children. A large and efficient Episcopal school 
numbers its pupils by hundreds, many of whose par- 
ents are Mormons, for about five-sixths of the people 
are " Saints." Take a flock of sheep in the pleasant 
April days, flecked white with lambs, each saying its 
a-h-dbs for its mother, and you have the picture. 

The communion service is celebrated every Sun- 
day, and while Smith was yet preaching, the cup- 
bearers with silver pitchers of water were noiselessly 
serving the multitude, of which every one partook, 
even to the infant in arms. Then the last hymn 
was sung, the benediction said, and the great congre- 
gation poured out from every side like ants from a 
disturbed hill, and the Tabernacle was solemn and 
empty as a cave. 

The death of Brigham Young was confidently be- 
lieved to mark the beginning of the end of Mormon- 
ism ; that individual ambitions and jealousies would 
explode the system like a bomb. But it is not true. 
When the delusion is dispelled it will not be by 
earthquake shock or government enactment or medi- 
tating bayonets, but because the incoming Gentile 
tide will wash out of it all its color and its strength, 
and the Gentile sun will draw it up in a misty cloud, 
and the free winds of the world will blow it quite 
away. 

3 



26 SUMMEK-SAVORY. 

THE UTAH INDIAN. 

The tribes of Utah were Brighain Young's fast 
friends. Whatever he did, he never broke a promise 
to them, and they became his faithful allies. The 
night after his death the Indians kindled signal fires 
along the mountain peaks, and thus telegraphed the 
event eighty miles down the valley. An old chief 
who had known Young since he entered the wilder- 
ness came up by the train the next day, and, accosting 
no one, went directly to the president's m.ansion. John 
"W. Young met him at the door, " Want to see Brig- 
ham." "Father is dead," said the son. "Let me see 
him," persisted the chief. "Well, come in," and the 
Indian straightened his blanket, smoothed back his 
hair, drew himself up, and said, " Eeady." 

Entering the room, he took in everything without 
turning an eye, and asked: "Where Brigham?" "In 
this box," was the answer. He approached, laid his 
hand upon it, and said: "Brigham dead? He here?" 
and then, when his doubt was dispelled, he shook 
with emotion as no paleface ever saw a savage moved 
before, his broad chest heaved, and with the exclama- 
tion, " Brigham dead ! Brigham dead ! " he burst into 
tears, fairly convulsed with grief. The son stood si- 
lently by until the chief, measurably controlling his 
emotion, readjusted his blanket, gave one look at the 
casket, and saying, "Me go home, — tell people Brig- 
ham dead. Be much cry there," left the house, went 
direct to the depot where the southward-bound train 



GLIMPSES OF UTAH. 27 

was just whistling to go, stepped aboard and was gone 
with the tidings. 

The Indians on tlie railroads of the far West ride 
free. They are D. H's, to wit, dead-heads. The scale is 
graduated thus: hedgers, ditchers and writers, full fare; 
clergymen, half fare ; Indians, editors and infants, 
scot-free. The managers of the roads act wisely in 
issuing " complimentaries " to the Indians. Inces- 
santly roaming about, they become invaluable police 
at large. If anything is wrong with rail, bridge or 
culvert, or any obstructions are placed upon the track, 
their runners are sure to warn the engineer and pre- 
vent the catastrophe. Every paleface wdio rides upon 
the trains may be glad that the savages and the editors 
are friends to the railroad. Not a few narrow escapes 
have become matters of public news by this route : 
an Indian told the engineer, the engineer told the con- 
ductor, the conductor told the editor, and the printer 
told the world. 

The desert of thirty years ago, walled in by moun- 
tains, inaccessible by distance, is a city to-day of 
twenty thousand. The locomotive has found it, the 
trained lightning has struck it, fashion has overtaken 
it, the Gentiles are at its doors. Its broad avenues, 
with their twin brooklets and their double lines of 
shade trees, are traversed by street cars, its dwellings 
are nested in gardens, shrubbery and flowers, its peo- 
ple extend the open hand of welcome. You hear the 
prayers of our fathers and the songs of our mothers, 
and there is little outdoor evidence that you are in a 



28 SUMMER- SAVORY. 

city whose religion is as oriental and corrupt as the 
faith of the Moslem. 

I do not know whether it has been remarked that 
the children of a polygamous alliance more frequently 
resemble their mothers, but I think observation will 
establish the fact. The Sabbath is quite as rigidly 
observed in Salt Lake City as in any average village 
in I^ew York, and far better than in Chicago or the . 
majority of large cities in the East, and little presents 
itself to oiFend the most fastidious. Scenes of de- 
bauchery are unknown. In the ordinary sense of the 
word, the women of the old Mormon stock are fiercely 
virtuous. Since the advent of Gentiles and miners, 
in several regards the slippers are worn a little easier 
and a trifle more down at the heel. Altogether, the 
city is remarkably well governed. 

A lively and ludicrous warfare is kept up between 
the Gentiles and the Mormons. What the former lack 
in numbers they make up in bantam-like mm. Mer- 
chandise is brought down almost to the zero of eastern 
prices, and a traveler direct from California, where he 
is expected to huy a section of the hotel in which he 
sojourns, is astonished at the Utah moderation of 
twenty shillings a day. If there is danger of a lull 
in the battle, the papers all around the board trumpet 
the forces to a new charge, and they are sharp, saucy 
and aggressive as hornets in a heated term. 



GLIMPSES OF UTAH. 29 

CAMP DOUGLAS. 

"We crossed the city with the river Jordan at its 
feet, and the mountains standing off from it in a 
stately way on the east, and climbing seven hundred 
feet, and two miles out, we bowled in upon the splen- 
did parade ground of Camp Douglas. As neat as a 
nobleman's lawn it is, with its well-appointed bar- 
racks, its commodious and elegant officers' quarters, 
the tidy uniforms of the boys in blue, the old-time 
clank of swords, and over all, glowing in the setting 
sun, the most beautiful flag in the universe, always 
saving and excepting the white banner of the Prince 
of Peace. To tell the truth, I had not felt as if I 
were- in the United States since entering Utah, till I 
struck the camp and saw the flag and heard the con- 
cordant regimental band, as it gave " The Red, White 
and Blue" to the mountains that played it back, and 
the city that listened for it, and the setting sun that 
marched to it down the western slope. 

And then the great kennels of cannon — not a 
Quaker among them — long-range fellows with their 
noses toward the city waiting for orders. They gave 
me a comfortable feeling when I stood at the right 
end of them, for me, which is the wrong end for 
business. The city lies .at my feet like a great white 
flock tangled in the shrubbery; the sheen of the lake; 
the twinkle of the river; the air glorified as if an 
evening cloud had stained it fast colors; the gateless 
Gaza of Emigration Canon yawning below the camp. 



30 SUMMER-SAVORY. 

through which the travel-worn vanguard rode thirty 
years ago, and came out from the riiggedness and 
shadow of ravines into the sunshine and cahn of that 
Mormon misnomer, the Promised Land. Altogether 
it is a beautiful picture, and not easy to be forgotten. 
And then we rattled down into the valley and back 
to the hotel in the cool of the night, and the next 
morning were away for Ogden, and well out of Mor- 
mondom, with its border struggles, its dark and bloody 
ground, the unuttered sorrows of women and the 
gloom of homes that are loveless. That it can exist 
and not contaminate the body politic is one of the 
strangest imaginable gauges in a christian land to 
measure the greatness of the Republic. 



CHAPTER HI. 

PICTURES OF COLORADO. 

DENVER. 

IT was at Cheyenne that we got our first steak of 
the black-tailed deer — rich, juicy, dark, a luxury ; 
and yet I am frank enough to confess that a bit of 
Southdown mutton, or even one ewe lamb garnished 
with June peas, suits me quite as well. There was 
antelope also, — that timid little lady of the genus cer- 
vus I but I think Thackeray, after seeing the graceful 
creatures shaking their glimpse of white handker- 
chief at him, turning to watch him with a touch of 
human and feminine curiosity, and then bounding 
over the plains as light as thistle-downs, might have 
said he would about as soon dine ofi' of a fine young 
woman. 

We take the train for Denver, one hundred and 
six miles south, and nearly a thousand feet down from 
Cheyenne, and are careering over the rolling plains 
and getting down-stairs by the run. We are in Col- 
orado, the Centennial and the Silver State. We pass 
a town as much the child of " H. G." as the New 
York Tribune. It is Greeley, with its hundred thou- 
sand acres of fertile land checkered off with trees and 
traversed by trenches of water. Some years, it has 

31 



32 SUMMEK-SAVORY. 

kept a grasshopper boarding-liouse, and occasionallj 
there has been " a nipping and an eager air," but its 
general prosperity has been signaL Its harvests go 
bj water, and so do the people. Greeley, therefore, 
is loafer-proof. 

A few more swift dives and we reach Denver, and 
almost a mile above the level of the sea. It is the 
ma*rvel of mountain cities. l^ineteen years ago its 
site was an utter wilderness. To-day it is a young 
metropolis, the capital of a state bound to be opulent 
and great, a population that crowds twenty-five thou- 
sand, a vigorous press, and a great deal of it, — I can 
remember when a copy of the Rocky Mountain News 
seemed to belong to a menagerie of grizzly bears and 
mountain lions, as much a desert production as " the 
pelican of the wilderness," — the hub of a railroad sys- 
tem that spokes the state ; churches, schools, street rail- 
ways, business,, nerve, culture, refinement and a future. 
Set down in it at night, the gaslight dazzles you, the 
hotel cries assail you, the city astonishes you. It is 
an eastern cit}' to which mountain shoulders have 
given a big lift. The air is as pure as the wine at 
the wedding in Cana. It has tonic and tingle. It 
is like Cowper's tea : it " cheers but not inebriates," 
and if there ever was an awkward, toggle-jointed sen- 
tence, it is that analysis of the poet's " cup." The 
American Hotel took us in, and we M^ere comfortable 
at a shake of the bell — " rest and a shelter, food and 
fire." Let us take pattern from Bunyan's fellow with 
the muck-rake just at first, and not look up, for there 



PICTUKES OF COLOEADO. 33 

are angels in the air, and we may not care to look 
down. 

A PRAIEIE-DOG ECHO. 

There are coughs and coughs. There are the cough 
of derision, the cough of doubt, and the cough of em- 
barrassment; the cough that helps a halting speaker 
to bridge the little canon between one sentence he 
is puzzled to end and another he doesn't know how 
to begin, where his thought has tumbled through into 
the gulf of bewilderment ; the racking cough that 
goes before the coffin as the drum-major before the 
corps. Let not the compositor lay out the band by 
spelling that corps with an e. There is yet another 
cough, which may be called the cough colloquial and 
Coloradan. It is more frequent in conversation than 
profanity in the society of canal-horses. In your hotel 
at Denver you hear people coughing along tlje halls, 
— coughs masculine, feminine and neuter; a hollow 
cough in a distant room, a hacking cough in the 
office, a smothered cough in the cellar, a subdued 
cough in the garret, a guttural cough which is He- 
brew, a cough in the roof of the mouth which is 
like the last note of " the cock's shrill clarion " in 
Gray's Elegy. You meet people of deliberate step 
and feeble breath ; people whose respiration rustles 
like a silk dress, or pants like the ghost of a steam- 
boat. You enter the well-filled stores, and are served 
by men who punctuate their pleasant courtesy with 
small commas of cough, or bits of ahems, or interjec- 



34 SUMMER-SAVORY. 

tions of sneeze. Denver seems to be an outlying 
province of Swift's Honyhnhnms — pronounced hoo- 
in-mz, witli a whinnying quaver on the n — and you begin 
to get nervous and ask questions. But when you learn 
that all these coughers and wheezers and sneezers 
came up hither for health not long ago, with hardly 
strength enough to bark above their breath, and that 
they are improving with might and main, you are 
comforted and composed. I meet eastern friends who 
are perfectly well, but came here in wretched plight. 
"But why don't you go home?" "Ah, that's the rub! 
"We have kept going home, — slipped back every time, 
like the frog in the well, into the old trouble, and re- 
turned to brace up." I encounter several officers of 
the same name, and all Generals — there are two in 
sight this minute — who can live nowhere else ; a 
name as common as John Smith, for it is General 
Debility. It is astonishing how^ feverish a man grows 
to escape from a capital place when he finds it impos- 
sible ; but between death and Colorado, the last is 
everybody's first choice. 

JEWELRY. 

Lapidaries abound. At almost every corner you 
see rich displays of Colorado " specimens," from tiger- 
cats to moss-agates. Rings, pins, charms, chains, set 
with smoky topazes, agates, onyxes ■ — which are noth- 
ing like lynxes — garnets, opals, amethysts, jaspers, 
and bits of petrified woods. You see crj^stals of topaz 
that weigh ten pounds, and gulch and mountain are 



PICTURES OF COLORADO. 35 

full of gem-hnnters who, armed with hammer and 
knapsack, take twenty-mile tramps for the treasures. 
And there is curious excitement in it like watching a 
game of chance. You pick up a rusty gray stone, 
knock off the clinging sand, and pocket it with a 
doubt. The lapidary may tell you it is a choice moss- 
agate, or a pebble just right to shie at a sparrow. 
The mountain jewelry trade engages many hands, and 
much skill and taste. A tourist abroad has a royal 
way, you know, of buying things for ten dollars that, 
returning home, he finds he could purchase around 
the corner for eight. And so it comes to pass there 
are "millions in it." 

When that hobble-de-hoy of yours was a baby, 
Colorado was a wilderness that howled, and I have 
been attending the State Fair of that same Colorado. 
The law of limitation has apparently been suspended ; 
the cabbages are larger than many of Dr. Peters' 
asteroids — to the naked eye; three ears of the clean 
white corn would make a club for Hercules ; the 
wheat is fit to be asked for in the universal petition ; 
the products of the dairy are admirable, and I was 
prepared to expect it, for if ever a State exemplified 
the proverb, "there is room at the top," it is Colorado. 
I was in her sky pastures a mile and a half above the 
sea, where thousands of cattle round up like the moon 
at the full. But the geological department was sim- 
ply magnificent. The precious metals lay about in 
boulder, nugget, crystal and powder. Almost every 
description of gem but the diamond mocked the rain- 



36 SUMMER-SAVOEY. 

bow, and lay about amid all beautiful shapes and 
crystals of quartz, lead, iron and coal. About every 
letter of the alphabet that spells e-a-r-t-h was repre- 
sented. 

And the people were there by thousands, and then 
more thousands. They are an English-speaking peo- 
ple, they are our people, cordial, hospitable, with the 
first love not died out of them. What we love at a 
thousand miles away we forget at three thousand. 
Seven days and nights are a little too long a range for 
Cupid's common arrows unless he puts more strength 
in the bow. 



T 



OHAPTEE IV. 

"YE CRAGS AND PEAKS." 

OU shall be riding in a street-car through the 
city of Denver on a -double-eagle of a day, clean 
gold and fresh from the Mint. The trees have shaken 
out all sail for the summer. The bees are booming 
about among the flowers. The children are playing 
in the shade. The grind of the wheels of commerce — 
and the street-car — is in your ears, and you look 
through the window into the invisible air, not one 
midge or mote to a sunbeam. You shall see an arc 
of the western horizon jagged, scolloped and broken 
down with mountains all dusted and drifted with 
everlasting snows. You shall see the white billows 
of innumerable winters, as they seem tumbling on in 
stupendous silence to whelm the world. If there 
could be such a thing, and anybody could comprehend 
it, I should say it is a picture of thunder. And yet 
there is no suggestion of tumult, as the words imply, 
but rather of a comforting stability and an unspeak- 
able calm. Like death they have "all seasons for 
their own," and stand and triumph over a turbulent 
world. What surges must have broken over the prow 
of this planet at some time, till the Arctic caught 
them in the act and struck them with frost, and there 

37 



38 SUMMER-SAVORY. 

they hang about the bows of the craft through the 
ages, the pale corpses of the troubled and disastered 
sea. And behold, the Arctic is here beneath the all- 
day sun ! 

long's peak. 

Had the founders of Denver meant nothing more 
than to sit down and have a lifelong look at the grand- 
est mountains on the continent, they could not have 
chosen better. Here is an amphitheatre with a sweep 
of three hundred miles of peaks and crowns and towers 
and crags, not one of them withdrawn beyond the 
range of an immediate presence. In this perfect air 
human vision is as keen as an eagle's. The eye " car- 
ries" two days' journey and does instant execution. 
You sit in the car, and looking northwest behold the 
white-helmeted poll of Long's Peak fending off the 
sky with a lift of two and two-thirds miles above the 
sea. It is eighty miles away, but as palpable and 
distinct as a picture on your parlor wall. You see 
the shadows lying under the lee of the mountain. 
You see the black gashes of old battles with earth- 
quake and lightning ; you note where the glaring 
white tones down into sandstone red and granite 
gray. You see the maroons and the blue velvets, and 
all the trickery and enchantment of light, distance 
and shadow. You discern the timber line, where 
vegetation dwarfs itself in a fight for life and a foot- 
hold, as if huge grenadiers should dwindle down to 
drummer-boys in the front. You can make out the 



"YE CRAGS AND PEAKS." 39 

columns of tall timber farther down. You can watch 
the clouds around the mountain shoulders like one of 
the smothering ruffs of Queen Elizabeth. And it is 
eighty miles away ! 

And we talk of its vastness, while, if piled peak 
upon peak, it would take ninety thousand Longs to 
reach the moon, whose lakes men have meandered 
without going from home. Ah, there is plenty of 
room in the sky-parlors, and Denver is a splendid 
place to study anatomy and count the spinous pro- 
cesses in the continent's backbone. 

pike's PEAK. 

Then, turning to the southwest, Pike's Peak, the 
mighty milestone and monument to thousands of the 
old miners, stands erect and flat-footed upon the world. 
It is seventy-five miles to his base, but the view is 
as clean-cut and clear as a cameo. Should I tell 
anybody it is 13,985 feet high, it would be no very 
satisfying information : should I say, You must climb 
about twelve miles to reach the summit, it would be 
better; but suppose the reader swings a little tea- 
kettle over a fire on the sea-beach, metonymically, 
it will boil at 212°. !N"ow pick up kettle, kindling- 
wood and thermometer, and begin your climb. At 
5,300 feet the water is in active trouble at 202°. 
Playing Longfellow's young man. Excelsior, again, at 
the altitude of 10,600 feet it is in a lively state of 
unrest at 192°. Another lift to the top of the Peak, 
and the peripatetic kettle makes a tambourine of the 



40 SUMMER-SAVORY. 

lid and plays so mild a tune that what scalded you 
promptly and satisfactorily down by the sea will be 
no hotter than the tea strong enough to " bear uj) an 
egg," wherewith our grandmothers chinked .up their 
hearts and limbered their toiigues after a big washing. 

How often lofty people forget that ebullition does 
not always mean earnestness and fervor. Boiling wa- 
ter is not necessarily hot water. 

Pike's Peak is not the tallest of the white Carmel- 
ites of the mountains, but he is the omnipresent peak 
of Colorado. He follows you wherever you go. You 
catch a glimpse of him from the north at a distance of 
a hundred miles. Fine as a piece of choice old china, 
it is a page of solid geometry torn from the book and 
magnified and glorified ; a true cone of pure silver. 
He confronts you on the west. He is sixty miles 
nearer, but seems no grander than before. He is an 
unscalable peak still. He seems to be standing off 
and on, and waiting for you at all points. But when 
you draw near, Pike loses his symmetry and shows 
rugged and irregular. What seemed a stately white 
tent for the occupancy of angels camping out for a 
picnic is turned into a mighty cairn of crags and 
boulders. The peak is blunted to a great stone-yard 
of eighty acres, and as poor plowing as a pyramid. 
But it is a trick of all mountains to strike their peaks 
as you approach. It is only when you leave them in 
the distance that their swelling grandeur returns. 

Tall mountains and great men are alike. They 
show best a great way off. ISTever climb a mountain 



"YE CEAGS AND PEAKS." 41 

to see its peak. Yon may as well hope to kindle a 
fire with chips from the North Pole. 

" COLORADO SPRINGS." 

Taking the Denver and Rio Grande railroad, a 
cunning narrow-gauge, while its officers are broad- 
gauge, you pass the Rocky Range in review, count 
peaks thick as stacks of grain in a rich harvest ; look 
across the upper edge and dry side of rain storms to 
the ridges beyond ; run down the line seventy-six 
miles to a place called Colorado Springs, because it has 
none, and to Colorado City, because it is none. The 
former is a beautiful prairie town ; the latter, the old 
Territorial capital, is shrunken and rusty, the paint worn 
off and the pluck worn out. Nothing but a politician 
out of business is more forlorn than a deserted capital. 

A stage is waiting for you at the dry Springs, like 
a lighter around a ship, to take you six miles to Mani- 
tou. You step upon the platform, and there stands 
Pike waiting for you. He is only eighteen miles off, 
and so you step on his toes when you touch the 
ground. Colorado Springs might be a fine prairie 
village in Illinois, if it did not happen to be in Colo- 
rado. It has a frontispiece of " specimens " and 
" views " to tempt the tourist. Heaps of geology 
abound, at prices so long that you need " a pocket 
full of rocks " to hegin with. And then you go up 
hilh There is a feeling of snow in the air, but the 
fields are in bloom. You look away to the Peak, and 
see a snowstorm drawn in chalk lines between you 
2* 



42 SUMMER-SAVORY. 

and tlie raountaiii. It is a profile, a genuine cartoon, 
of a piece of winter weather. But that snow never 
touches ground. It weeps itself away in a slow drizzle. 
It is a white shawl dripping with fringes of water. 

Manitou, where the springs really are, is an ex- 
quisite nestling-place in the mountains. Of course, 
Pike is standing before the door of your hotel. The 
great rock-bowl of splendid soda, grand enough to 
grace a symposium of the whole Pantheon, is a min- 
ute's walk distant. Its edges are chased wnth silver- 
white soda, for it always sparkles and forever over- 
flows. Up a beautiful glen are the great iron springs 
whose waters will turn a clear glass goblet into an 
amber-tinted beauty, and as fast colors as an Ethiop's 
skin. I think a man might swallow w^ater enough 
in three months to make a respectable lightning-rod 
of himself, and cheat those modest peripatetics with 
thunder-gust bayonets out of a bargain. It is said 
there is sufiicient iron in a man's blood, anyhow, to 
make a shot to kill him, and why shouldn't that 
water make hardware of him altogether ? There are 
spacious hotels, cozy cottages, delightful lounging- 
places, shaded paths and beautiful views at Manitou. 
It is worth two Saratogas for health and recreation. 

THE MOUNTAIN HOME. 

Living twelve miles up the world from this retreat 
were two valued friends of " lang syne," and the desire 
to see them was stronger than gravitation, so up we 
went through the Ute Pass to find them. The Pass 
is a narrow canon overhung with rocks, overarched 



"YE CRAGS AND PEAKS." 43 

with trees, now roofed with not more than twenty 
feet of blue sky, now turning under hoods of crags, 
now out into little bays full of tangled luxuriance. 
Aspens all along shake in their shoes, and pines give 
their same old sigh. The splendid road has more 
crooks than the horn that jarred down Jericho's walls, 
and it goes through throats of places that make you 
feel for your windpipe. We met two things when 
climbing the Pass. One was a storm that threw one 
solitary thunder down the gorge from top to bottom 
without striking a stair. It was startling as if a rifle- 
cannon should call you to breakfast. The other was 
an eccentric, sparkling stream that leaped and flashed 
from ledge to ledge at our left. Here, it came fifty 
feet at a tumble ; there, it splintered like a lance 
against a crag; yonder, it darted bright as silver; 
now, it larked black as ink ; then, it was fleecy as 
Jason's sheep; again, it was smooth as a looking- 
glass. It confronted you, it flanked you, it was an 
incessant surprise, and a success also. 

So we climbed through, and out into the rolling 
country, but always up, meeting greasy Mexicans with 
long double-files of lean mules and leaner oxen draw- 
ing ore down to the railroad ; meeting solitary horse- 
men ; seeing cabins and pleasant homes here and 
there, until we were nine thousand feet above the sea, 
and that Pike was waiting for us at the end of our 
journey ! We saw the scar of a trail, and a dished 
landscape, like a foot-bath at the feet of the Peak, 
and a long, low, broad-brimmed house with a home- 



44 SUMMER-SAVORY. 

like look and neat ont-buildings abont it, and a white 
tent like a big mushroom. It was our friend's ejrie, 
and we were made M^elcome. 

Soon night came up, for in the moimtains it never 
comes down. Had Homer — who was Homer? — been 
a Coloradan, he would never have said the god "came 
down like night." First, the valley below filled with 
darkness ; then, the basin we were served up in ; then, 
the dish overflowed, and the tide of shadow slowly 
rose along the mountain sides. We were over head 
and ears, fairly drowned in night, but Pike's snow- 
cap yet glittered in the sun. The unclouded sky 
had not blossomed out with celestial asters. By-and- 
by the mountain was up to his shoulders in dark- 
ness, and then he dotted his white cap for a turban 
of red kerchief that slowly faded to a dim, cold gray, 
and it was night all over. Then the voices of noc- 
turnal birds startled the stillness, the long whine of 
a mountain lion up the canon, the bay of a dog down 
the valley, and a score of indescribable rustlings and 
whisperings, made the silence lonely and audible. 

We had climbed out of the world of railroad and 
telegraph. We had gotten into the back chamber of 
the century. And — oh, the delight of it! — we had 
escaped the hammer and the clangor, the banging 
and the twanging of the wires ever clanging, the 
wires ever wrangling. That forty-fingered girl with 
her piano had not found us out. There was noth- 
ing above us bnt the signal station and the stars. 
It was a new sensation. 



"YE CRAGS AND PEAKS." 45 

Entering the house we sat down like four signs 
of the zodiac around the generous fireplace, and 
torches of light pine flung their clear white splendors 
everywhere, till the house shone like an engine's 
headlight. Talk of the golden illumination of wax 
candles, and the glare of gas chandeliers ! There is 
nothing so brilliantly beautiful as the fat pine fire 
by night. It is more than heat and light. It is 
cheerfulness, comfort, company and content. The 
remembrance of that fireside shines like an evening 
star in the mountains. May those that kindled it 
ever have an abiding star for all the nights of their 
two lives, that "goes not down nor hides obscured 
among the tempest of the sky, but melts away into 
the light of heaven." That far-off scene is as near 
as the left breast. The two trout-ponds, gorgeous 
with fish that must have been caught out in the 
crimson and golden rain of Danae and been speckled 
for life; the .prairie-dog village up the road; — they 
were "not at home," the four-footed prevaricators! — 
the great furnaces of lime and charcoal, the ebony 
and alabaster of the mountains ; the clear sweet air, 
that you want a great deal of if you run a race ; 
the complete escape from the elbows and turbulence 
of the world ; the boyish expectancy, on tip-toe for 
something to prowl down the canon, or lumber out 
of the woods, or steal forth from the cleft rocks, say 
a cinnamon bear or a mountain lion ; the stateliness 
of Pike; the friends we found there; — all make an 
enduring picture and a delicious memory. 



OHAPTEE V. 

"THE GARDEN OF THE GODS." 

A K hour's drive from Manitou brought ns into an 
/v up-hill and down-dale region full of rocks in 
all grotesque shapes and tints; red, gray, pink, yel- 
low, dead white; the eloquent evidences of disturb- 
ances in days so long ago that almanacs do not name 
them, when something put a shoulder to the strata 
of rocks and lifted them out to the light; and here 
they are, gnawed by the elements, carved in fantastic 
forms innumerable. The lower stratum of sandstone 
was more edible than the upper that rests upon it, 
and so winds, rains, frosts and suns have eaten it 
out, and left necks upon which are mounted masses 
of the more durable rock, curved, rounded, poised and 
perched upon the lean, long, uncanny necks. 

Think of a multitude of stone toadstools, six, ten, 
twelve feet in diameter ; of Chinamen's hats done in 
pink, yellow, red, with mossy rosettes; of awkward 
sun-bonnets weighing two tons apiece, always slipping 
off and never falling; of stone bowls, big as caldron 
kettles, bottom side up on pillars; of ogreish heads 
wrapped about with gray turbans ; of loaves of over- 
done bread, two hundred pounds apiece, set upon the 
rocks to cool ; of a crop ,of capped and hooded gate- 

46 



"THE GARDEN" OF THE GODS." 47 

posts waiting to be harvested ; of petrified dumb-bells 
such as Jupiter might have practiced with before 
throwing his thunderbolts ; of a flock of witches in 
red tatters squatting around in dumb petrefaction ; 
of masses of rock as big as a house poised upon stones 
the size of a pumpkin ; of whole families of Leaning 
Towers — no end of Pisas — accenting everything in a 
manner more emphatic than delightful; — think of all 
these at once, and you will know something of this 
sandstone nightmare. 

In and out we go among these queer leavings and 
carvings of what were once solid books of stone. Did 
you ever see an old volume that the book-worm had 
tunneled and honeycombed? Do you remember how 
spangly the maple-sugar was when ladled out upon 
snow or dropped into water? It is a jumble of ideas, 
and so are these sandstone jokes, jests, frolics and 
fritters. Here is Mrs. Grundy's head, her chisel of a 
chin and her incisive nose threatening each other 
across a long unhemmed mouth ; and tongue, head, 
cap and all, dumb and motionless in a blessed sand- 
stone silence. Alas, that it is not the ubiquitous lady 
indeed, that no more the question should be heard, 
"What will Mrs. Grundy say?" There is !N"apoleon's 
hat. It weighs five hundred pounds if it weighs an 
ounce. There is a prehistoric look about things, and 
you feel as if you are four hundred years old yourself. 
You are afraid some of those Saracen heads will cry 
"Bismillah!" — the baker come out to look after his 
loaves — the toads leap forth and sit upon their 



48 SUMMBK-SAVORY. 

stools — Mrs. Grundy prove not to be so very dead, 
or you turn into old red sandstone for other tourists 
to look at and laugh about. 

THE GOLDEN GATE. 

We are nearing the gate of the "Garden of the 
Gods. Some people have a masterly faculty for mis- 
naming things. Whether it is a baljy or a bowlder 
to be christened, the names they bestow could be 
interchanged without exciting a suspicion that either 
had been wronged. " Garden of the Gods " is about 
as appropriate as Orchard of Hesperus or the Yalley 
of Easselas. It suggests nothing, and it means all it 
suggests. Here is a park of five hundred acres of 
land, mountain-locked on the north and west, moated 
with caiions on the south, and walled with red sand- 
stone on the east, spread with grassy carpets here and 
there, and dotted with little pines and other vegetable 
stragglers. You approach a gateway two hundred 
feet wide, with red sandstone towers three hundred 
feet high, covered with sculptures that no man can 
read, and massive and rugged as are no other portals 
in the world. 

In the center of the way is a red pillar twenty-five 
feet high, which was probably the horse-block whence 
the Titanesses stepped to the pillions behind their 
lords and masters when they went their morning 
rides. You can see the walled-up windows whence 
the old warders looked forth. You can see escutch- 
eons that no herald can make out ; chimneys standing 



"THE GARDEN OF THE GODS." 49 

alone ; towers dismantled ; alcoves, broken arches, 
pinnacles, castle ruins, and all red as porphyry. And 
a little way off you see parallel walls that are marble 
white, and show in fine contrast with the cinnabar 
tints around. 

Kot long ago I saw photographs of the ruins of 
Ba'albek, and I said, a greater than Ba'albek is here ; 
these Titanic castles and fortresses wrecked and 
ruined, and greater in their destruction than the 
completed architecture of the Wrens and "Walters of 
modern times. Anybody can rear castles from foun- 
dation to turret, but only one architect can build ruins 
so grand, and his name is Upheaval. 

It was a splendid morning when we stood in front 
of the gateless Gaza, with its green lawn. A couple 
of men of standard stature walked through, and 
turned dwarfs as they went. At the right was a 
monumental group such as Cruikshank might have 
designed as the Graveyard of the Grotesque. But we 
halted in front of the grand entrance. There, set in 
a red frame, though eighteen miles away, was a royal 
presence. A vast white pavilion rose against the blue 
sky, as if the Titans had gone into grand encampment. 
Never was a fairer picture mounted in a more befit- 
ting frame. All galleries of art fade into insignifi- 
cance. All works of the old scenic masters are trifles 
as you gaze upon this. It was so restful and com- 
plete. It filled the eye and the soul as well. But 
it was not like Longfellow's pavilion when he sang : 



50 SUMMER-SAVOEY. 

" But when the old cathedral bell 
Proclaimed the morning prayer, 
The white pavilion rose and fell 
On the alarmed air." 

This tent was motionless as the arch of heaven, for 
it was Pike's Peak in a frame of porphyry ! 

Let us take the noble legend of the State of 
Colorado and engrave it beneath the picture : Nil 
sine Numine. 

My recollections of Colorado are of the pleasantest. 
I am glad I have lived to see her born into the Union, 
and as I took occasion to write a year or two ago, in 
alluding to the Centennial Exposition : 

Egypt! Earth's own eldest daughter, 

Colorado, silver bride! 
One mountain-born and one of water, 

Eldest — youngest — side by side. 
By one star more Centennial given, 

Colorado's Silver State 
Has reinforced the mimic heaven, 

And the Flag strikes ThirtytEight! 



CHAPTER YL 

HATS. 

THE manner in which certain excellent people 
lifted their hats forty years ago is of little mo- 
ment ; of too little, you must think, to need a pair 
of adjectives, reverently and carefully, to- describe 
it, but why "carefully"? They were not silk hats, 
but either felt or genuine beaver that had made jack- 
ets for the four-footed dam-builders and millwrights; 
beaver that would last four-and-twenty years without 
shedding their fur. 

Take the roomy bell-crowns, that flared like an 
old-time wooden churn bottom side up. They were 
safes and jpostojfices. In the garrets of those hats 
were deposited the letters received in a whole quar- 
ter, the huge fellows about as long and broad as a 
brick. There notes of hand, memoranda, accounts, were 
filed away. The men, most of them, stood sturdily 
on their legs in those days, and so were not top- 
heavy in the least. A red bandana sparsely dotted 
with white spots was also carried in the hat. When 
the castor was in position, there were three strata of 
commodities : first, letters and papers ; second, textile 
fabrics; last and lowest, the head. There were two 
ways of unroofing a man without emptying the gar- 

51 



52 SUMMEE-SAVOEY. 

ret; either he removed the hat, giving at the instant 
a little duck of the head, or he put up a hand as 
he careened the beaver, ready to catch whatever might 
tumble. The latter looked a little awkward, since 
it gave him the appearance of wanting to catch 
something alive, that might lurk in the loft, 

Nothing you wear comes to resemble you so 
nearly as the hat ; not the " soft " variety ; that is as 
stupid and devoid of character as a meal-bag; but 
the firmer fabric that " sets itself aright," and is grad- 
ually fashioned to your phrenology, flaring out at 
your caution, curving away in front of your percep- 
tives, or rounding out behind your love of children 
and — grown people. 

You have worn for a minute one of those brass 
hats, about as cumbrous as a king's crown, that, as 
the hatter adjusts it upon your head, dots a profile, 
a sort of ground plan of the cerebral regions, upon 
a piece of paper in the top of it. Did you much 
admire that line-fence of your faculties thus por- 
trayed ? Sometimes it is shaped like the print of a 
moccasin with an awkward foot in it, and sometimes 
like the anatomy of a sap-trough. A double Yankee 
inheritance would never enable you to guess what it 
was meant to picture, whether a kidney-bean or the 
track of a plantigrade, but a human head never! 

Hats, like their wearers, have grown ephemerah 
Once they lived as long as good dogs live, but now 
their average age is about six months. I respect a 
hat that has seen service, that has been worn evenly 



HATS. 53 

and steadily winter and summer, that has a whitish 
suspicion of edges, and has so accommodated itself 
to the wearer and grown nobby with his faculties, 
that he quite forgets he is not bareheaded. Find 
that hat drifting about on the mill-pond, and you 
immediately know whose body you are going to drag 
for. There is no more poetry in a hat of the firm 
variety than there is in a half-joint of stove-pipe. 
You cannot fancy the hero of a hundred battles in 
a silk hat. The very name of the article has a dis- 
reputable rhyming acquaintance with such words as 
bat, cat, flat, gnat, rat, scat and sprat. " Stick a 
feather in it," and it is hat still. "Wreathe it like 
Billy Barlow's : 

"All round my hat I wears a weeping willow," 

but it will not do. 

"He put his hat upon his head, 
And walked into the Strand, 
And there he met another man 
Whose hat was in his hand." 

Two hats in the same stanza, and two men with 
immortal souls engaged in carrying those hats in two 
different ways, is too much. But make them helmets 
and call them Greeks, or plumed bonnets and call 
them Scots, or shadow-shedding sombreros and name 
them bandits, and there is an element of romance 
and poetry that may possibly float the article on the 
rhythmic current. The tall hats of the Puritans have 
no more grace than a funnel, and the leafless pictures 



54 SUMMER-SAVORY. 

of the Pilgrim Fathers freezing about Plymouth Pock 
and towering up in their peaked hats always reminded 
me of something rank run up to seed in the fall. 

Figuring in political history, the hat has been 
garnished with the black cockade and the buck-tail. 
The crape " weeper " used to swing from it, and, as 
the mourner walked, sway in a slow and pensive way 
from side to side, like a black rudder without a 
helmsman. It is reverently lifted to sorrow, beauty 
and death. It is whirled about the head in visible 
huzzas, and shied enthusiastically into the air like a 
rocket. It is held forth for alms, and, muffled with 
a handkerchief lest you should hear the jingle of 
ignoble pennies, is passed about in the beneficent 
congregation. The mettled racers used to burst from 
the grand stand at the " drop of the hat." 

One family in the British Empire has the privi- 
lege of appearing covered in the presence of royalty, 
and all the old Quakers wore the broad-brim unre- 
buked in the presence of God and man. 

When the wearer cocks his hat over his right eye- 
brow it means defiance, if it doesn't mean — a fool. 
If he sets it squarely upon his head and pulls it 
down like a percussion cap to the tips of his ears, it 
is determination, if it is not — doggedness. Let down 
the hammer upon that hat, and he will explode. If 
he throws it back upon the nape of his neck like 
the calash-top of a chaise, it signifies a careless inde- 
pendence and a propensity to "face the music" with 
his whole countenance. 



CHAPTEE YII. 

THE MEN OF GROOVES. 

THERE is a fatal facility about grooves. They 
are wonderfully easy things to run in. They 
are labor-savers and man-savers. They save time, 
trouble, bravery and brains. It is as if rivers ran 
down stream both ways, and oars had never been 
invented. 

The groove-bound doctor attacks the patient in 
typhoid fever according to a formula so old as to be 
mossy, and the result is often something else that is 
mossy, if you give it time enough, to wit, a grave. 
The medicine and the disease are too much for the 
poor fellow, and between them he comes to grief and 
"goes to grass." Yenture to suggest to this vendor 
of antiquities the virtue of good nursing and nourish- 
ing food, and incessant watching that nature has fair 
play, and he denounces it as the wisdom of old women 
which is foolishness with mummies. The doctrine is, 
better die according to law than live according to 
grandma ! The physician who studies his patient like 
a new book ; who reads his peculiarities as if they 
were in print; who sees wherein this case differs from 
any other ; who recognizes the fact that man is not a 
stereotype, and who linds his treatment less in the 

55 



56 SUMMER-SAVORY. 

pink-and-senna scented library than by the bedside; 
who dares prescribe what he thinks rather than what 
he remembers; who believes that books record other 
men's experiences, and can be verified or condemned 
only by his own, — this man can never be a man of 
grooves. 

THE TEACHER. 

The most useless of stupidities is the teacher who 
is a groove-rnnner ; who has swallowed text-books 
without digesting them, and feeds his pupils with the 
morsels as old pigeons feed squabs, until, like himself, 
they are all victims of mental dyspepsia, which is a 
carious synonym for education. Children subjected 
to such diet are as likely to get fat and strong as so 
many grist-mill hoppers, that swallow the grain with- 
out grinding the kernel. Such teachers foi'get that 
one, like Judith's sister " Feeble-Mind " in Cooper's 
novel, may have a prodigious memory. Who has not 
known a fool who remembered everything he heard 
and just as he heard it, who could run up and down 
the multiplication-table like a cat upon a ladder, and 
rattle off rule after rule without missing a word, and 
that was all there was of it — he was a fool still? 
A good memory built into a well-made intellectual 
structure is a noble blessing, but that same memory 
with nothing to match it is like a garret without any 
house under it ; a receptacle of odds and ends, that 
are worth less than those papers that losers of lost 
pocket-books are always advertising for, "of no value 
except to the owner." 



THE MEN OF GROOVES. 57 

Take English grammar under the man of grooves. 
Learning to swim upon kitchen tables, buying a kit of 
tools and so setting up for carpenters, are all of a 
piece with his grammar. Hear them defining a prep'- 
sition as "connecting words, and showing the relation 
between them," when not one pupil in a hundred 
ever finds out whether it is a blood relation or a 
relation by marriage. Hear them parse : " John 
strikes Charles. 'John' is a noun, masculine gender, 
third person, because it's spoken of, sing'lar number, 
nom'native case t' 'strikes.' 'Strikes' is an irreg'lar, 
active, trans'tive verb, strike, struck, stricken, indica- 
tive mode, present tense, third person singular, and 
'grees with John. Yerb must 'gree with its nom'native 
case 'n' number and person. ' Charles ' is a noun, 
masculine gender, sing'lar number, third person, 
'cause it's spoken of, objective case, and governed by 
' strikes.' Active verbs govern the objective case — 
please, sir, S'mantha and Joe is a-makin' faces ! ' " 
And all in the same breath ! What ardor ! "What 
intellectual effort ! What grooves ! Meanwhile, 
grammars mended, amended and emended, multiply. 
There are four things anybody can do : teach a school, 
drive a horse, edit a newspaper, and make a grammar. 
Meanwhile the same old high crimes and misde- 
meanors against the statutes are daily committed. 
This comes of grooves and the lack of a professorship 
of common sense. 

Take geography. The young lady fresh from 
school, who from a steamer's deck was shown an 



58 SUMMER-SAVORT. 

island, and who asked with sweet simplicity, "Is 
there water the other side of it ? " had all the dis- 
covered islands from the Archipelago to Madagascar 
ranged in grooves and at her tongue's, end. " Didn't 
you know," said the father to his son, who expressed 
great surprise at some simple fact, "didn't you know 
it ? " " Oh, no," replied the little fellow ; " I learned 
it a great while ago, but I never Unew it before ! " 

Take arithmetic. Show a boy who has fnished 
the book, and can give chapter and verse without 
winking, a pile of wood and tell him to measure it, 
and ten to one he is puzzled. And yet he can pile 
up wood in the book, and give you the cords to a 
fraction, but then there isn't a stick of fuel to be 
measured, and that makes it easier, because he can sit 
in his groove, and keep a wood-yard. " So you have 
completed arithmetic," said the late Professor Page, 
of the State N^ormal School, to a new-come candidate 
for an advanced position ; " please tell me how much 
thirteen and a half pounds of pork will cost at eleven 
and a half cents a pound?" The price was chalked 
out in a twinkling. " Good," said the professor, 
" now tell me what it would cost if the pork were 
half fat ? " The chalk lost its vivacity, the youth 
faced the blackboard doubtingly, and finally turning 
to the teacher with a face all spider-webbed with the 
lines^ of perplexity, and with a little touch of con- 
tempt at the simplicity of the " sum," and, possibly, 
of himself, he said, " It seems easy enough, but I don't 
know what to do with the fat ! " That fellow was 



THE MEK OP GROOVES. 59 

not a fool, but a groove-runner. A little condition 

was thrown in that he never saw in the book, and 

that groove of his had never been lubricated with 

fat pork. 

- THE clbegyman: 

Clergymen are liable to preach in grooves; to 
employ certain hereditary forms of speech that blunt 
the edge of expectation ; forms whose first words 
suggest their followers to every hearer, and leave 
nothing to be listened for. Men should preach in 
types, and not in ste7'eo-ty'p^s. Words should not be 
uttered in blocks of phrases. It is dull and lumber- 
ing business. The art of putting things is a great 
art. Truth is old, but then in what numberless lights 
it may be revealed ! Truth is the sun. He shines 
with one steady, everlasting beam, but behold the glo- 
ries of refraction, that give the color and the beauty 
of the world ! Preachers should be refractors. They 
should see the Bow from the mountain-top as well 
as from the plain. Hope dwells in the valleys, but 
Faith is a mountaineer. They should sometimes see 
the circle swept and finished, — the seal of the new 
covenant complete as the marriage-ring of Earth and 
Heaven. There is no grooved route to such van- 
tage-ground of view, — such glimpses of glory. 

Dionysius, the tyrant, has been sufficiently de- 
nounced, but the tyranny of grooves has never been 
written. Several years ago I spent a day or two in 
the engraving department of the Treasury. The men 
sat in rows and in silence before a well-lighted table. 



60 SUMMER-SAVORY. 

One was at work upon a Pilgrim, and another giv- 
ing Pocaliontas a friendly touch. But what inter- 
ested me most was this : you remember the line par- 
allel lines that used to cross the postal currency, like 
fairy furrows. The lines grew dim with frequent 
use, and it was necessary to sharpen them by deep- 
ening the impression. There sat a man with a worn 
plate before him, and a little instrument like a gang- 
plow. He set it carefully upon the plate, and ran 
it through those miniature furrows. Should he vary 
a hair's-breadth, the plate would be defaced and ruined ; 
but he struck the groove with unerring accuracy every 
time. He said, " I hear the tool fall into the furrow, 
and then I run it right through." I bent my ear 
to listen, but no sound even as loud as the tick of a 
dying watch rewarded the effort. To my unprac- 
ticed sense there was no sound at all. The man 
laughed and said, " Neither could I at first, but now 
I hear it as plain as a hammer ! " 

Grooves are subtle things sometimes, and a man, 
like that gang-plow, strikes into them without know- 
ing it, until he can travel nowhere else without spoil- 
ing his work. Denunciation of this " cold and un- 
friendly Avorld" is one of the groove formulas, and 
some clergymen almost make us fancy they think 
the Devil made it, and not the Lord, who pronounced 
it "good." There is another and a better world, but 
let us thank God for this, the very best world we 
have ever been in. 

"Life's field will yield as we make it, 
A harvest of thorns or flowers," 



THE ME]Sr OF GROOVES. 61 

It is wonderfully easy to talk in a groove. A 
noted professor of Hebrew went to Germany to spend 
a year or two in study. One of his associates of tlie 
faculty began to pray him on to the ocean before he 
had left ]^ew York. It was a new phrase introduced 
into his chapel petition, " Our brother on the briny 
deep." It was the Atlantic ocean surrounded by 
prayer. And so all autumn and winter he kept that 
unfortunate man " on the briny deep," like the Fly- 
ing Dutchman, in all weathers, until when the pro- 
fessor strack salt water there was, to say the least of 
it, a very cheerful cast of countenance among the stu- 
dents in the chapel. And there he kept the He- 
braist on shipboard while he was walking Unter der 
Linden ; while he was buried in a parchment volume 
as big as a trunk ; while he was smoking a pipe at 
Heidelberg; and when he was happily home again, 
it almost seemed as if it might require a steam-pump 
to get the " briny deep " out of that prayer. 

THE GEOOVE LETTER. 

The average letter always runs in a groove. It 
has no more individuality or heart than a writ of 
ejectment. A letter should read as a good friendly 
talk sounds, but it seldom does. It begins with a 
" Dear Sir," when the writer wouldn't grieve him- 
self to death were you sent to state's prison for life. 
He addresses you through three mortal pages, and 
concludes with a " Yery respectfully," or a " Cordial- 
ly," or some other thing equally absurd. They mean 



62 SUMMER-SAVORY. 

as much, these cast-iron beginnings and endings, as a 
Bantam's top-knot, or a ringlet in a pig's tail. Why 
do not people write as they. feel? Grooves. Women 
are better letter-writers than men, because honester. 
If a woman despises you, she never loves you in a 
letter. Her heart is too near the point of her pen. 
There is no more relation between the expressions' of 
courtesy that adorn letters and the real sentiment of 
the writers, than there is between the shingle rooster 
on the ridge of the barn and that brood of yellow- 
legged chickens in the door-yard. 

ENTHUSIASM. 

Grooves are fatal to discovery and invention. No- 
body who follows them ever ventures " across lots " 
for new results. The man of grooves always traveled 
the two sides of the triangle in great stupidity . and 

A . 

content | ^ It was somebody else that struck across, 

lined the hypothenuse, and discovered the shortest dis- 

A 

tance from a to b. r\ The world smiles at and 

' B 

about enthusiasts a great deal, and upon them a very 
little, but it owes them a debt it can never pay, for 
all that. Enthusiasm is wonderfully contagions. How 
pupils catch it from an earnest, all-soul ed teacher ! 
There is a professor of Greek in the State of New 
York — may his days be long in the land! — who 
inspired his pnpils, and made them all wish they 
had been born in Athens, and almost persuaded them 
to believe that the dialect of the Blest is some sweet 



THE MEN" OF GROOVES. 63 

and unwritten Ionic. His word to his classes was, 
" Come, let us be Greeks together." Though his 
children are daughters, he has been the father of 
many Hellenists. The shadows of years have not 
dimmed my recollection of those recitation hours he 
made the pleasantest of the twenty-four. The Doc- 
tor's enthusiasm kindled the dead Greek into a liv- 
ing tongue, and the Attic Bee could have found 
honey upon his lips. But more than this, his enthu- 
siasm kindled in hosts of hearts a flame of admiring 
and grateful memories that will never die out. 

EOBEET KENNICOTT. 

And how could' I write anything about enthusi- 
asm without naming young Robert Kennicott, of the 
Smithsonian Institute, the friend and companion of 
Agassiz ; the boy naturalist, born to observe Nature 
and to interpret her to his superiors in age and in 
knowledge of mere books, but w^io was fated to die 
away there in British America, whither he had gone 
to open a new page for the perusal of mankind. Be- 
fore his lip had the down of a peach, he found 
"books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, 
and good in everything." Living at " The Grove," 
a few miles from Chicago, he often visited the city 
with little discoveries he had made and specimens he 
had collected, and almost always called at the office 
of the writer. There would be a knock, the door 
would open, and he would begin to talk before he 
closed it, and talk his M^ay up to the table, and talk 



64 SUMMER-SAVORY. 

himself out-of-doors. It was a flower, a bug, a bird, 
a quadruped. He was full of plans to help others to 
see as he did. He bristled with facts. His mind 
was luxuriant. He had a love for natural science 
" passing the love of women." He read in concen- 
tric circles from his boyhood home farther and farther 
until he read the State of Illinois. He explored its 
Delta, that queer region with tropic traces, that is 
bounded by the Mississippi and Ohio. He brought 
out its plants, caught its butterflies, unearthed its rep- 
tiles. No hardship was too severe if only he could 
add some coveted specimen to his cabinet. Slight 
in frame, he would be brave as a lion if anything 
for his darling science could be gained by it. What 
a companion he would have been for Audubon ! How 
like an infusion of fresh young blood he was to the 
sober old professors with whom he came in contact? 
The last time I met him was in the halls of the 
Smithsonian Institute at Washington, where he had 
been preserving and arranging some of his captures. 
As he conducted me through, and pointed out this 
and that, with apt, swift words of explanation, how 
happy he was ! By and by we stood amid a splen- 
did collection of rodents, — rats, squirrels, marmots, 
beavers, and all the four-footed tribes of gnawers. 
And then, seizing one and another he would say, 
" This fellow, you see, digs for a living, and here is 
how you know. And this one couldn't jump from 
tree to tree, like little Red Jacket there, and you see 
why, — he lacks a rudder to steer by. And this, you 



THE MEN OF GROOVES. 65 

see what kind of food he must eat, because here are 
the tools he did it witli. That foot, — look at it, — 
made to run both ways, up and down a tree at will. 
And here is a shady fellow, loves twilight, — see his 
eyes; and here one that is happiest in the sunshine, 
and loves warmth, and likes folks if he can keep them 
at arms-length." And so he I'an on with the texts in 
his hand, and, though wholly unpremeditated, just 
what he said would have made a delightful lecture. 
His mind was brimful all the while. 

Poor Robert ! Science lost a rarely-gifted son, 
whose simplicity of character, gentleness of spirit and 
enthusiasm of soul made him beloved in life and 
mourned in death. 
3* 



OHAPTEE YIII 



THE NORTH WOODS. 

THERE is a range of hills in the county of Lewis, 
seven miles to the summit, called " Tug," and if 
ever anything was well named, it is that same range. 
Had the duty of christening it been given to Adam 
he could not have done better. It is a short word 
with a sharp pull to it. It straightens the traces to 
twanging point. It is as expressive as anything in 
the language, — Tug! This morning I am on the 
lowest step of this mighty flight of stairs, about two 
tall church spires above the lovely village of Lowville, 
that Goldsmith would have embalmed in rhyme had 
he ever fluted his way into the Yalley of the Black 
River. Stand here by my side, and you shall see a 
panorama. Before you is a splendid table of green 
and gold, — of pasture and meadow and grain. It is 
the table of abundance. Beyond it, the land drops 
away into the lap of the valley that holds Lowville 
in its apron. Along the eastern edge of the valley, 
like a piece of silk braid upon a seam, is Black River, 
and beyond, — ah, beyond, is the great wilderness in 
the heart of ]^ew York, stretching away to the lake 
that Commodore McDonough immortalized with the 



THE HORTH WOODS. 67 

thunder of his triumphant guns. The rising sun 
touches the woods and tints the smokes, and the for- 
ests, that were drawn up in black and solid columns 
all night long, stand apart, and open their ranks a little 
to the bright lances of the sun. You see little square 
clearings set deep in the woods here and there, like 
panel-work, and cigar-boxes, painted white, scattered 
about in the openings. Before you are the great 
North Woods, where the panther's cry and the foot 
of the prowling bear are familiar as plantain in a 
farmer's door-yard ; where the rattle of the moose's 
hoofs used to crackle like burning hemlock as the 
mouse-colored monsters crashed through the wilder- 
ness ; where wolves, gaunt and gray, made night hide- 
ous. As it was forty years ago so it is to-day through 
a rugged region of an hundred miles. Colton's Map 
of the New York Wilderness lies open upon my knee. 
I lift my eyes from the paper, and lo, a thirty-mile 
sweep of the original, draped in the mountain blue, is 
full before me'. Let us climb the hill another stair. 
We turn, and the picture unrolls like a scroll. 

There are figures on the slant hillsides. You mis- 
trust mowers, but you hear nothing. It is the world 
in slippers of list. It is a picture of profound peace, 
and unbroken silence, and power everlasting. You 
fancy Rob Roy could have stood here when he said, 
"Were I to lose sight of my native hills, my heart 
would sink and my arm would wither like a fern i' 
the winter blast." A few rods down the steep side, 
as if it had halted for breath on the Gothic roof, and 



68 SUMMER-SAVORY. 

would make a new bound and over the eaves in a 
minute, is a trace of crashing roar and grinding 
strength ages ago. It is a bowlder as big as a house. 
It has had battles with icebergs. Arctic bears may 
have clambered up on it, and shaken their white jack- 
ets in the feeble sun of the J^orth. The bears and the 
bergs have vanished, but the rock remains like a great 
altar of sacrifice. Beneath the rock are two burrows. 
Reynard the fox dwells in the basement, and feasts 
like a traveling elder upon the chickens of tlie land. 
It is the Yalley of Rasselas. Life is an unruffied flow. 
People live on into the fourscore and ten. You see 
a veteran laying stone wall under the blazing sun, 
and lie is seventy-seven. Yonder in the meadow is a 
man " raking after," and he is eighty. You get your 
first glimpse of a hay-tedder. It is a quadruped. 
Each foot has a pair of long, crooked claws. Its office 
is to shake up the mown grass, and kick it all over 
the lot. It is as vicious as a mule, and the champion 
kicker of Christendom. It provokes a smile every 
time it goes into a spasm. You see a hop-yard and 
a bean-field. Life in the valley is like the hop and 
the vine of " Jack the Giant-Killer." It runs noise- 
lessly, and it always runs one way, — left to right is 
the hop's route. Right to left is the bean's, — isn't 
it ? And if it is, why % 

Sing of the pines and the palms and the cedars of 
Lebanon, but grass is the very grandest clothing of the 
globe. Without it animal life would dwindle to " a 
feeble folk," and the earth would be a desert. It 



THE NORTH WOODS. 69 

might have been worse for the ancient king, after all, 
than to be turned out to grass. The hill counties 
never have so rich a look as in haying time. Such 
velvets as the shorn fields show you, — golden green 
with the touches of the sun, — are never seen any- 
where else out of kings' palaces. 

Among the most exquisite features of the hill coun- 
try are the elms, with their Corinthian crowns of green 
sculpture. They are sprinkled everywhere; — now 
drawn against the sky and clear of the world, from 
the top ridge of a hill, and now planted all about in 
the valley pastures like the columns of temples begun. 
Oaks are rugged, maples hide whole summers in their 
leafy recesses, but for airy grace and enduring beauty 
the elm excels them all. It is the lady-like tree of the 
woods. 

SEVEN LAKES. 

There are seven pieces of fog just tangled in the 
top of the forest. Unlike the article coveted by Jason, 
the wool dealer of old times, they are silver instead 
of golden. The writer stood in his boyhood about 
where we stand to-day, and with him one who guided 
his uncertain steps. Those seven fleeces were there 
then ! That faithful friend and guide bade the child 
count them, and then he said, " Those little clouds 
are a sort of picture in the air. Beneath each one in 
the depth of the woods is a lake. You cannot see it, 
but it is there, and it will be there, — its silver picture 
yet hung above it, — when you and I are gone." With 
that we came silently down the stairs, and the boy 



70 BUMMER-SAVORY. 

longed to be twenty-one, that he might do the first 
man's business of his life, — penetrate that wilderness 
and look upon the mysterious originals of those aerial 
phantoms. One of the twain long ago went away to 
be at rest, which is far better, and the other is here to- 
day. There is not a stain upon those untarnished pict- 
ures. Like the Clouds of Magellan, they are everlasting. 
Though the writer has never yet seen the calm and 
shaded waters, he knows that they are there. He be- 
lieves those lips that never told him wrong, and behold 
here the seven witnesses to bear testimony every sunny, 
summer morning ! The lesson of the wilderness is 
worth bearing away into the thronged world, — the 
lesson of faith in the things unseen and eternal ! 

VILLAGE ROOSTERS. 

You pass little villages in the valleys. There is 
a period in the life of small villages, as of small 
girls, called the "hateful age," when kitchen smokes 
are distinguishable and instructive; — that woman h^d 
fish for breakfast, and this one flesh ; — where every- 
body dwells in a glass-house, and is about as con- 
spicuous as if he lived in a lighted lantern. If you 
want to be inventoried, walk the streets of such a 
village, and the* pagans will "take "'you like a photo- 
grapher. You'll be a stereoscopic object in spite of 
yourself. Doors will be ajar with noses in them, and 
the sharpest eye they have. Faces will be framed 
and glazed in the window-panes. You will be fairly 
surrounded by observant pagans. It has occurred to 



THE NORTH WOODS. 71 

you how many more people there are in a little 
hamlet that resemble a disabled milking-stool, " w'lth- 
out any visible means of support," than there are 
in largier towns. See the front steps of that village 
store, this minute. One, three, five, eight, — there 
are nine persons, like the ancient blackbirds, "all in 
a row." They liave gone to roost, but they are as 
observant as magpies. A lady is coming down the 
street. Those nine heads, carrying eighteen eyes, 
turn to the right and watch her. As she nears them 
those heads swing slowly around. As she passes they 
are all front-face. They see her from top-knot to- 
gaiter-button. Then slowly to the left those eyes 
revolve. They follow at her heels like spaniels. 
They run up her dress to tlie nape of her neck like 
mice. 

When Robert Raikes with his Sabbath schools be- 
gan upon the London gamins, he commenced with 
sermons, but he couldn't get at them. He must un- 
earth them first. So he revised his practice and tried 
soap and_ water, got down to the boys and succeeded. 
Every such village should introduce hydropathy for 
the health of store-door and tavern-step roosters. It 
should buy a hand fire-engine, not for the purpose 
of putting out fires, but extinguishing loafers. I 
should like to help man the brakes in some of those 
villages where they keep the featherless poultry on 
the door-steps ! 



72 SUMMER-SAVORY. 



■RETIRED FARMERS. 



Many of the villages in the hill counties are 
blessed — or otherwise — with the kind of man called 
"a retired farmer." I am quite aware that I am 
treating of "the bone and sinew" of the land; 
that politicians, u} their rural raids on the eve of 
elections, carry the idea that because a man has per- 
manently crooked his back at the plow he must 
therefore be morally straight as a ramrod ; that a soft 
white hand and a smutty heart are one pair, and a 
horny, sun-browned palm and great cleanliness in tlie 
left breast are another. Concede it all, and yet what 
business has a stout, hearty farmer to "retire," and 
sell his home where his children were born and his 
fields made abundant answer, and go to the nearest 
village, and get his milk from a tin cow, and buy a 
rickety piano for his girl, and sit on dry-goods boxes 
and whittle sticks? That a man who has lived in a 
stone pen half his days, and had a brick earth under 
his feet, and a strip of sky a hundred feet wide and 
half a mile long over his head, should sigh to shut 
day-book and ledger, and go away into the clean 
country, and have a round horizon to himself, and a 
sky not cut in slices like a card of General Training- 
gingerbread, is no mystery. But the liegira in the 
opposite direction is incomprehensible. The farmer 
depreciates when he " retires." He is worth less to 
the world than he was before. The day he trans- 
plants himself he has done growing and doing. To 



THE NORTH WOODS. 73 

be sure, he underbids the village day-laborer some- 
times, and so takes the money out of the father's 
hands and the bread out of the children's mouths ; 
but unless this be a contribution to the community, 
he is not distinguished as a benefactor. In fact, 
" retiring " is not quite safe for anybody who desires 
length of days. About the driest sticks imaginable 
are statis-tics, but they tell a grave truth when they 
show that where a man voluntarily withdraws from 
his life-work lie is about done living. As a rule, 
"he died in the harness" is a pretty good epitaph 
for man or horse. 

AN OLD HOMESTEAD. 

American homes are, general]}^, about as ephemeral 
as a morning-glory, and furnish quite as elocjuent a 
sermon as can be preached, upon the evanescence of 
earthly things. 

A home where a grandmother smiles down the 
generations like a small, benignant providence ; where 
rooms here and there all over the house are hallowed 
by birtlis and deaths and • weddings and contented 
toil ; where bits of old furniture keep you from for- 
getting you were ever a child, and whither you escape 
as to an altar of refuge from the heat, hurry and 
heartlessness of the big world, and grow better and 
younger for it all, — such a home is an ordained 
preacher ; but, alas, how often, in tliis land of change, 
is it " silenced," and ignobly banished from the 
ministry ! 



74 SUMMER-SAVORY. 

Just the place for old relics and heirlooms is this 
hospitable homestead where I write. " The olive- 
branches" are all scattered and gone but one, and slie 
brightens np the house for the tall father and the 
faithful mother "and the stranger within the gates." 
Just the place for hair-trunks, red, brindled and white, 
and worn in spots as if they had been chafed by a 
harness; trunks trimmed with brass nails, and lettered 
upon the cover with the same "O.S.," which may well 
mean old style, for lack of a better rendering. A little 
hand-trunk, about the size of a large woodchuck, is 
brought out, girt w^ith a little leather strap. It is 
older than reader and writer together. It is fat with 
papers going back into the babyhood of the century. 
Here is the colonel's commission, signed by a dead 
governor, attested by a dead secretary ; and here 
another, showing his right to be called captain ; and 
there, close by war, is love ! Here is a woman's writ- 
ing, neat and regular, wherein she berates him in 
quaint verse for his attentions to another girl. Girl? 
Bride, mother, dead, dust, near half a century ago ! 
And here is the rhyming answer, on yellow paper 
withered as an autumn leaf. But they kissed and 
were friends. Just the place for old daj'books and 
ledgers. Here are fifty pounds of them, written in a 
hand as plain as a guide-board. Pages covered with 
the names of dead men and dead women that were 
transferred, many a year ago, to gray slabs and marble 
monuments among these mountains, and away to the 
West where the red skies promise a glorious morrow ; 



THE NOKTH WOODS. 75 

accounts for ribbons and calico of patterns as dead as 
the Pharaohs. We turn the big books back beyond 
the $ Cts. Mills, of Federal money, and here we are 
among the £ S. D. of the old world ! 

The sight of these relics quickens the memory, 
and stories are passed about, the latest of which is 
no chicken, not one of them being less than twenty- 
five years old. The faithful wife and mother, younger 
at sixty-nine than the Dolly Vardens of a single score, 
brings out the cards with which she won many a game 
aforetime. A pair of aces with handles to them is that 
" lone hand " of hers — a brace as mysterious to mod- 
ern eyes as anything unearthed at Pompeii, for they 
are the old-time tools for carding wool. And so the 
talk and the show run on, giving glimpses that grow 
rarer every year of the sturdier times, when the 
Adams " delved " and the Eves " sj)an " ; when men 
fought wolf and wilderness, and women marched 
abreast with men. 

Almost every old house among the mountains is 
haunted by gray-headed stories, as jolly as so many 
sparkling Octobers. You can hardly stand by the 
grave of a pioneer where a laughing anecdote does not 
mar the solemnity of the weedy and silent place. 

But our rambles in the woods are ended for the 
year. As an Irishman might be charged with saying, 
wood is one of the most precious of metals. " From 
the Ark on Ararat to the Cross on Calvary," wood 
has been instrumental in the salvation of two worlds. 
Did you see the precious woods in the Brazilian de- 



76 SUMMER-SAVORY. 

partment at the Centennial ? The clouded marbles 
right from the tree ; the rose-tinted, ambei'-colored 
surfaces, just as they grew, ranging almost from ebony 
to alabaster, and richer than any work of art? 

But to me there is no more beautiful wood than 
the hard maple, the rock maple, the sugar maple, that 
sweetens thought with memories of the bubbling 
kettles in the faint-blue, smoky woods, with the soft 
April moon over the right shoulder, and the promise 
of resurrection showing here and there in the leafy 
loam at the edge of the snow-drifts; and the little 
camp with its roof of mighty barks and its couch of 
hemlock boughs; and the early eggs tumbling about 
like dolphins in a baby kettle of sap ; and the girls 
chattering by the fire, seated upon a divan of straw ; 
and the men looking like quaint pictures of " Libra 
the Scales." But the maples are down, and so are 
the patient wearers of the wooden yokes, and so are 
the girls, and a trampled street runs over the site of 
the camp-fire, and corn waves and gardens smile 
where squirrels and vines ran up and down the 
rugged maples at their own sweet will. If memories 
are deathless, as some men think, then there will be 
stray recollections of the sugar-bush where they sing 
the New Song. 

But beyond the flavor of the maples is the sight 
of them ; now, when they roll up their clouds of 
green in the summer, and now, when winter has 
blown away the leafy tempest, and the trees are logs, 
and the logs are cleft, and built up in the old fire- 



THE NORTH WOODS. 77 

place, and the splendor of fire takes possession of the 
log hut fit for rabbits to hide in, and the rudeness 
becomes radiance, and the homely heap a palace, 

I have a looking-glass that has had in it a whole 
generation of shadows, and the frame of it I saw in 
the living tree, and it was as full of birds'-eyes as a 
pigeon-roost in full feather; and there is a maple 
ruler somewhere that a leaden plummet followed 
when I drew lines to write " compositions " by, about 
" Spring," and " Health," and such things : an imple- 
ment that was applied sometimes to my open palm 
in a warming, if not a welcome, fashion ; and that 
ruler is as full of curls as the head of a golden-haired 
Saxon, and about the color of it. Ah, South America 
is gorgeous, but North America is glorious ! 



CHAPTER IX. 



FUNERAL EXTRAVAGANCE. 



THE OLD GAEDEN. 



IT was a long time ago, but the picture is plain as 
yesterday. A little village like a bird's nest among 
the leaves. A house, low-browed and double-chim- 
neyed, where lilacs blossomed by the door-stone, and 
roses looked in at the green window-panes. On one 
side, an orchard with robins and seek-no-furthers — 
they used to call them signifyders? On the other, 
a garden with a broad walk down the middle, bordered 
•with pinks and garden sorrel, four-o'clocks and nas- 
turtiums. There were columns of carrots and battal- 
ions of beeta and companies of parsnips and regiments 
of onions, and a row of cabbages, a squad of green 
recruits, all stupidly standing, wrapped in their volu- 
minous ears, awaiting orders. There was a sort of 
general's staff of sweet-corn in a corner, all with drawn 
swords and tassels of silk; and a plumed troop of 
asparagus in the rear ; and a picket line of damson- 
plums and currant bushes along the fence. There 
were sage and summer-savory in their little beds, while 
an Indian tribe of painted poppies drowsily camped 
among the families of dill, caraway and coriander, for 



FUNERAL EXTRAVAGANCE. . 79 

Sitting Bnll was not yet. Watermelons green as 
an earth with perpetual summer, and muskmelons 
marked like an artificial globe with meridian lines, 
and conical-shot of cucumbers that were trying their 
best to be cactuses and soured into pickles at failing, 
composed the garden artillery, while peas in white 
favors that carried plump knapsacks of green, and 
their cousins the beans, those pets of the Fabii, that 
climbed the poles with the agility of Darwin's own 
private grandfather, made up the commissary corps of 
the garden. The balmy shadow of a great Gilead fell 
upon the path by the gate and sweetened all the air, 

THE boy's funeral. 

In the little door-yard were two Lombardy poplars, 
married by a grape-vine that aproned its clusters and 
swung over the path and shed sun and rain like a 
roof. In that shadow on a summer's day stood a tea- 
table, with a coffin of cherry upon it, and just as 
much silver about it as a chrysalis has. Upon a lit- 
tle pillow within lay the head of a dead boy — verily, 
a pillow of perfect rest — one of that countless mul- 
titude of whom the Savior had said, " Suffer little chil- 
dren to come unto me, and forbid them not." I am 
afraid the mother disobeyed and forbade, but the child 
heeded the invitation and went. 

The neighbors stood reverently around, the minis- 
ter beside the coffin. He read a chapter; said a few 
words to " the mourners," as was the fashion of the 
day ; he told us all to be even as little children, and 



80 SUMMEK-SAVORY. 

invited ns all in the name of the Master. And then 
" they sang a hymn and went out," as the disciples 
did from the supper — out into the yellow road, and 
away to the grave-yard. There was no plumed hearse, 
that carriage for one, and glossy as anthracite out of 
the mine, but only "bearers." All walked but the 
aged, the feeble and the dead boy. The grave-yard 
was as full of gray slabs as a quarry, and they leaned 
this way and that, and bore dates that went back into 
the seventeen hundreds, and texts of scripture, and 
quaint little couplets that limped into the grass and 
crept under the moss and were lost. They were the 
very " sermons in stones "of the old play. Some fam- 
ily graves were like the strings of David's harp, — 
father, mother, children, side by side. But summer 
was doing its best to cover everything up with luxu- 
riant life. < 

Beside the gate stood a bier, — a lean, black frame 
with four handles. It stood there winter and sum- 
mer, always waiting, alwa3^s ready. Some seasons the 
grass grew up rank and tall around it, as if to hide 
the thing from passers-by, but it never could be lost. 
Death was sure to find it. And so the boy was buried 
out of sight. All was done decently and in order. 
The funeral was not a ceremonial, but a simple, neigh- 
borly, loving service. 

SETTING OFF DEATH. 

I do not mean to say that in these crowded times 
any such method is possible. I have no grudge against 



FUNERAL EXTRAVAGANCE. 81 

the undertakers, and the makers of caskets, and the 
drivers of monrning coaches, and the ostriches that 
lend their feathers ; but I do mean that the ostenta- 
tious and the rich are setting a deplorable example 
to the world. Nobody of ordinary means can afford 
to die, or at least to be buried, at present prices. It 
is a piece of extravagance not to be indulged in. It 
is something strange how it comes to cost so much 
to get into the world before you have begun to be of 
any use, and to get out of the world after you have 
ceased to be of any use. 

I mean to say that the extravagance of the age 
follows us to the grave ; that many a widow has 
robbed herself of daily bread to give her poor hus- 
band as grand a funeral as her neighbor's, that he might 
ride for once in state who never rode at all. A lit- 
tle late for him to enjoy it, the demonstration is for 
people who never cared for him when alive, and who 
shall cry, " A splendid funeral ! " as the procession 
creeps by, like dots of shadow in the sunshine ; or, if 
not that, then because she takes this way of 2'elieving 
her heart and expressing her sorrow, even as the Indian 
widow sometimes voluntarily sacrifices herself on the 
funeral pile of her dead husband. And neither of them 
is a reason. I know of a funeral, only yesterday, of a 
poor laboring man of two hundred and forty dollars a 
year, whose funeral cost eight months' wages. It was as 
if he had cut off the total income of his wife and chil- 
dren in an instant, and taken away with him two-thirds 
of a year's wages besides. It certainly would have been 



82 SUMMER-SAVORY. 

very unkind of him, if he could have avoided it; he 
would not have died if he could have had his own 
way. But the unkindness comes in somewhere all 
the same. It is fathered upon the public sentiment, 
fostered by vanity and pride, and not by grief and 
aifection, that a man must be treated better after he 
is dead than he ever was in his life. 

Our Irish follow-citizens make a pageant of a 
funeral, if not a festival. They yield to nobody in 
their demonstrations of respect for the dead. Their 
processions are drawn out like an Alexandrine line, 
and their funerals are a success. "Who is dead?" 
asked somebody, as twenty or thirty carriages filed 
along the street. And the reply was, " It is either 
some public dignitary or an Irishman. I'll inquire," 
and it proved to be a porter in a down-town store ! 
The love of an Irish mother for her children is a 
proverb, and I must respect the feeling with which 
she robs herself of the necessaries of life to give her 
darling what the world shall pronounce a fitting 
burial. 

But, say the objectors, " what would you have ? 
Shall we not honor our dead ? May we not do as we 
please with our own?" And the answer is just this: 
let the funeral obsequies be conducted appropriately 
and well, but shut out vulgar extravagance from the 
severe presence of death. Let not the lavish expendi- 
ture of the rich invest dying Mith two terrors for the 
poor: first, the dread of death itself; and second, the 
dread of how they shall defray the cost of the funeral. 



FUNEEAL EXTRAVAGANCE. 83 

FLORAL OFFERINGS. 

Flowers are beautiful and significant. Placed in 
the hand or on the breast of the dead, strown upon 
the coffin and gracefully disposed about it, they be- 
come sinless preachers in whom is no guile. It is 
pleasant to see a young girl lying amid the flowers 
she loved, — the flowers that are so like her. It is 
suggestive to see the strong man shorn of his strength 
holding a little flower in his dead fingers. How strikT 
ingly the likeness of the earthly fate of the two comes 
out when we see them together ! But even this is 
carried to an excess that calls for censure. Costly ex- 
otics are fairly stormed down upon the dead in op- 
pressive profusion. It is a wholesale slaughter of the 
innocents because one man has died. I have no sat- 
isfactory statistics at command, and if I had they 
would be more unsatisfactory still, but it is safe to 
assume that money enough is annually expended in 
this country in the purchase of flowers for excessive 
funeral decoration, and for princely casket and cor- 
tege, to support fifty thousand orphans for a round 
year, and to fill the failing cruise of fifty thousand 
widows. And so there is some show of justice in 
saying that this prodigality produces the sufiPering it 
does not relieve. 

Somehow i\\e purchase of floral ofl'erings for our 
own dead always seemed to me a little like the paid 
mourners and weepers of earlier English times. But 
when these gifts come spontaneously from friends, just 



84 SUMMER-SAVORY. 

as they sprang from the earth, all thought of commer- 
cial values is happily banished from the mind. One 
December day, Lizzie, one of the loveliest girls in all 
the world, died at Hamilton, JN^ew York. She was the 
light of the household, and a challenging angel that 
summoned out all the better qualities in everybody 
around her. I do not know why she died. Does any 
one ? It was gray v/inter weather, and the floral glory 
of open-air gardens was gone. But flowers came from 
here and there throughout the village. One plucked 
the solitary calla-lily she was cherishing for a Christ- 
mas festival. Another severed the rosebuds that should 
never blossom. The windows even of humble homes 
were bereft of their fragrant occupants, and so they 
came in hands and baskets — and may I not say, in 
hearts, v/ithal? — through the chill air, and made all 
beautiful and summer-like around the dear little girl 
as she slept. Ah, there was no ostentation here, but 
a tribute as simple and unafl'ected as the flowers them- 
selves. It reminded me of that other funeral with 
which I began this article — the out-door obsequies 
of her far-away uncle, " the little boy that died." 

The beautifying of the last sleeping-places of man- 
kind is a noble and an ennobling work. I would not 
have it diminished if I could. The loveliness is for 
all, and when poor men and women " take their places 
in the silent halls^" they share and share alike, as do 
the heirs in an equitable will. Perhaps the shadow 
of some great man's monument may fall upon their 
graves, for at last they are admitted into what the 



rrKERAL EXTRAVAGAlSrCE. 85 

world calls good society. Only this: If dying, a man 
cannot relieve the distresses of the poor immediately 
around him, and have at the same time the costliest 
of monuments, let his executors direct that the pro- 
posed shaft be shortened a few feet below the original 
design, and a sculptured angel or two be left out, and 
the sum they would have cost be given to the poor. 
So shall they be angels indeed. 

A girl on the threshold of womanhood died, 
lovely, loving and beloved. Her life was like sun- 
shine in shady places. Her resting-place is marked 
by a plain marble, recording her name and the dates 
of birth and death. You must look elsewhere for her 
monument, and you will find it. Her father built a 
church-edifice free to the poor, and a school-room be- 
side it, and he named them both for her. And finding 
it, you can take up the inscription for Sir Christopher 
Wren ; " If you would see my monument, look around !" 

Let men set forth their tables with a service of 
silver if they can, and garnish their halls with pictures 
and statues, and all things of beauty that are joys 
forever. So far they need not consult the comparative 
poverty of the majority, or pay it homage ; but in this 
matter of dying, all men and women are precisely 
equal before God and the world. The burial is a com- 
mon necessity, and for this reason, if for no other, 
these barbaric funeral extravagances of wealth should 
be held "more honored in the breach than the observ- 
ance," for the sake of those who are weaker and 
poorer than they. 



OHAPTEE X. 



"MINE INN." 



THERE is a quaint, old-world flavor about that 
A.nglo-Saxon word inne — inn. Direct, simple 
as mother-tongue can make it, the word tells all that 
is worth telling. Painted in black letters across a 
sign, oval and white as an egg — -an anomalous egg, 
with little ringlets of sheet iron around the curve — 
and the sign set upon a post that leans a little, as 
if to give the word Italic emphasis, it is at once an 
announcement and a card of invitation : " inn." The 
unhappy William Shenstone, who said he found his 
"warmest welcome in an inn," would have understood 
it, warmed to it, and accepted it. 

" Tavern " is the next homeliest word, with a 
democratic touch to it that gives it little favor. Ap- 
ply it and see : Astor's tavern, St. Nicholas tavern ! 
And yet, why not ? " The old London Tavern " had 
more wit and genius within its walls in some dead 
day or two than was ever congregated at the St. 
Nicholas or the Astor in a round ^^ear. The word 
brings up the picture of the bare broad table printed 
off in circles with flagons ; of a mighty cheese, over- 
come and sagging with its own richness ; of the pipes 



I 



"MINE INN." 87 

of cla}^ rolling np the smoke of their narcotic offer- 
ings ; of breezy-voiced Englishmen and " God save the 
King." 

"Caravansary" — a tavern for caravans — brings up 
a far-away Oriental scene, with a four-footed train 
just filing in from the sands. The very word sug- 
gests turbans and spices and silver-tailed horses, and 
a gloomy court that looms up with camels. 

"Hotel" is as French as a frog. It is second 
cousin to palaces. It is applied to everything in 
America that " takes in " strangers. It means any- 
thing by the roadside that promises " entertainment 
for man and beast." 

" House " is also an aristocratic, ahnost a royal, 
appellation. The House of Hanover, which glitters 
with coronets and crowns and magnificent possibili- 
ties, may designate a hemlock tavern in the West, 
where a tempestuous runner shouts "All aboard for 
the Hanover House!" Landlords are often "left" to 
give their own . names to hotels, and sometimes they 
are singularly absurd. A man named Hatch built a 
house and proposed to call it after himself, but it 
never occurred to him how precisely it would desig- 
nate a residence for incubating poultry, till somebody 
put the words together before his eyes : " Hatch 
House." Ming — a name that Dickens might have 
invented — bestowed the patronymic upon his house 
in Missouri, and everybody about the place fell to 
talking through his nose. The big dinner-bell said 
nothing but " ming " ; a dusty, snuffiing affair, jangled 



88 SUMMER- SAVORY. 

with a wire, called " ining " in a qneriilous, nasal 
way, and ming it was until, a few months ago, the 
old house was burned down, and even then it was 
ming, for it ming-led with the elements. You can- 
not hum such a name out of anything! 

There is a public-house in Ohio whose name, if 
shouted at any educated and edible fowl less tough 
and overdone than a tailor's goose, would throw it 
into fits. Think of yourself following oiF a fellow 
who had roared " The American Eagle " at you, and 
some gamin in the crowd about the depot crying 
after you, " There goes a bite for the 'Merican Eagle ! " 
If like Jupiter's bird you could clasp a talon on him, 
nothing but the law against cruelty to animals would 
prevent your making a thunderbolt of him. Ameri- 
can is very well, and Eagle will do, but American 
Eagle measures too much from tip to tip. 

There is a funn}^ little affectation of grandeur in 
the way of announcing arrivals at modern caravan- 
saries. Thus you read that A. B. has " taken rooms " 
at the Cosmopolitan. You call on A. B. and you 
find him in number 196, fourth fioor back, quite 
above the jurisdiction of the State, and higher than 
you have ever gotten since you took the pledge ; one 
chair, one pillow, and eyed, like a cyclops, with one 
window ; a room as hopelessly single as Adam seemed 
in his bachelorhood. But " rooms " is statelier, and 
we all enjoy it except A. B., who skips edgewise to 
and fro between trunk and bed, as if he were bal- 
ancing to an invisible partner. But things double 



"MINE INN." 89 

and magnify in an atoning way when he comes to 
pay the bill, and finds the footing as high as the 
room, altogether a high-toned institution from clerk 
to closet. 

THE BUSTLER. 

I saw him to-day — the bustler. He bustled into 

the hotel dining-room — the long, quiet, decorous 

apartment where everything is subdued into pleasant 

murmurs — and lifted up his brassy voice, so that 

everybody looked and felt as if a big bumblebee had 

come blundering in, that they wanted to drive out 

with the broom. He talked as if he knew more 

about conversing with a herd of cattle than with civil 

people. And he accompanied himself with a knife- 

and-fork tattoo, and took two tines of the latter in 

his teeth like a country singing-master getting the 

pitch, when the only pitch for him should have been 

the pitch out-of-doors. He was a vivacious animal, 

and suggested a stall or a pen, or a yard with a high 

fence; was as breezy as a March morning, and just 

as disagreeable. And how he stared at you like a 

bull's-eye ! He should have been made to shut up 

like a policeman's lantern, and then hept shut. He 

snapped his fingers for the dining-room girls, as if he 

had lived in a kennel, and gave a little whistle like 

an impudent wind at a keyhole. What he meant by 

all this was, that it was he himself, that he was 

there^ — that he was made a little first, and then this 

world was gotten ready for him as soon as possible. 

He is the man to overwhelm the average hotel clerk, 
4* 



90 SUMMER-SAVORY. 

buzz him down and get number 2, while the mildly- 
spoken gentleman who is not a bumblebee gets num- 
ber 182, and no elevator. Bustler could do nothing 
without noise. Had he happened to be a tailor, his 
needle would have creaked like a swinging sign. I 
do not see how, but it would. When he drank jou 
heard him. When he ate, his jaws rattled, and you 
might have inferred from his shaggy manner that he 
had taken a turn-about with Romulus and Remus, 
and been suckled by a wolf. I always suspect that 
such a man had no sisters, in the gentle sense of the 
word; and that if he had any at all, they were only 
boys in petticoats. 

ADONIS. 

The hotel clerk, who equitably parts his hair in 
a hemicranian way, and waves it out in two pinions 
till he looks a little like Mercury when he puts on 
his winged cap and gets ready to fly ; who wears 
white porcelain shirt bosoms and a seal ring, with 
a stone in it big enough to kill Goliah if little David 
had the handling of it; who looks you over in a 
supercilious way, and puts you on the fifth floor back 
because there is a dent in your hat, and your coat 
shows the ghost of a chalk-mark on a seam or two — 
this fragrant bandbox of a man always terrifies me. 
The higher he puts me up, the lower he puts me 
down. He degrades me in the sight of the bell-boys, 
the porters, the chambermaids and the office loungers. 
Even the bit of a bell-boy that shows me skyward. 



"MINE INN." 91 

goes leaping up the four flights of .stairs like a ship's 
monkey up the ratlines, and sometimes he is out of 
sight altogether. 

Had I been assigned to room " 10," he would have 
paced demurely before me like a little man, and I 
should have given him a quarter. ISTobody whips a 
brush out from under his arm, and pursues me and 
whisks my coat here and there, as if he were seeing 
how near he could come to it and not touch it, and 
the reason is that I am the man in " 240." Then 
my bell is so far off and so faint that no one hears 
it, and, if heard, it gives no one any trouble. It is 
as useless as a Canterbury-bell with a string to it. 
Even the waiters in the dining-room have found me 
out. They know the man from " 240," and they 
treat me as if I were an object of charity. They 
never look my way, and the ear that happens to be 
next to me as they pass is always a little out of 
order. They do not suspect that I am the victim 
of the vicious geography of that caj)illary Adonis in 
the office. But everything corresponds, and when 
the bill is presented it proves to be on the same floor. 
It is a high-toned proceeding altogether. What shall 
be done with that clerk? If there were only one 
of him, a shilling's worth of halter would do, but 
who can afford to keep a ropewalk running for the 
manufacture of halters for the execution of Adonises? 

An Adonis refused John J. Audubon, the orni- 
thologist, a room at a JSTiagara hotel. He stood and 
lied to him with a regretful smile that the rooms 



92 SUMMER-SAVORY. 

were all taken. And it was simply because Mr. Au- 
dubon's boots lacked a shine, and the best side of 
him was not the outside of him. James G. Percival, 
the poet, was put into a sky-parlor in Galena, be- 
cause there wasn't brass enough in him to make a 
pin, and Adonis was a fool. But then Mr. Percival 
would hardly have cared had they assigned him quar- 
ters above the eaves. And when the writer, seeing 
his name upon the register, inquired for him, and 
explained who and what he was, Adonis was repri- 
manded by the proprietor, and the proprietor apolo- 
gized to the poet, and reduced him to the first floor 
in half an hour, but Mr. Percival just ate his break- 
fast and went away. Adonis mistook Lord Morpeth's 
valet for Lord Morpeth's self at Detroit. You get 
that clerk's idea of nobility when he mistook the 
man for the master, and himself for a gentleman. 
But all hotel clerks are not Adonises. 

A BOEDER TAVERN. 

Were you ever a guest at a border tavern? The 
landlord is a tall Kentucky hunter. Blooded dogs — 
lean, liver-colored, and as full of points as a hedge- 
hog — lie gaping about the floor, or hunting in their 
dreams with yelps that die in their throats. A ped- 
dler enriches the animal kingdom ; one of those fel- 
lows that possess all a blue-jay's impudence and none 
of its beauty. Some rough fellows just out of the 
golden mountains, breeched in buckskin, frocked and 
belted ; a knife in a leather sheath, depending like 



"MIKE IJSTN." 93 

Macbeth's ghostly dagger, " the handle toward my 
hand " ; tangled and tawny, as to beard and hair, as 
the tail of a motherless colt on a burry common, 
snuffing the supper, pace the piazza with the springy 
gait of tigers before feeding-time. At the first click 
of the supper-room door latch there is a plunge of 
the sharp-set crowd for the tables, one or two being 
just too late for a plate, and turning their surly 
faces toward the board as they retreat, to wait their 
turn, with much the expression of a little dog driven 
away from a coveted bone by a big one. And this 
brings me to say that if you are going a journey 
in regions where it is "first come first served," the 
most serviceable piece of baggage you can take with 
you is a woman. If you have none, then marry 
one, for you are not thoroughly equipped for the 
road till you do. When dinner is ready you follow 
in her blessed wake, and are snugly seated beside 
her and exactly opposite the platter of chickens, be- 
fore the hirsute crowd, womanless as Adam was till 
he fell into a deep sleep, are let in at all. There 
you are, and there they are. You twain-one, with 
the two best chairs in the house, served and smiled 
on. Look down the table at the unhappy fellows, 
some of them actually bottoming the chairs they 
occupy, and the arms and hands reaching in every 
direction across the table like the tentaculse of a 
gigantic polypus. When night comes, it is not you 
that shift uneasily from side to side on the bar-room 
floor. If there is any best bed she gets it. More 



i)4 SUMMER-SAVORY. 

than all this, a woman keeps you "upon your honor"; 
you are pretty sure to behave yourself all the way. 

The conclusion is as strong as a lariat, that trav- 
eling bachelors have forgotten something, and that 
if a woman hears a man sneer about her troublesome 
sex, and their inevitable band-box, and then in some 
weak moment he says to her, "Will you?" — an she 
be wise she will be cautious. Men are not a tithe 
of the help to women on a journey that the latter, 
in their modesty or their ignorance — I beg pardon, 
which? — are always conceding. Blessed be nothing! 
A lone woman can make the transit of the American 
continent like Yenus crossing the sun, M-ithout either 
insult or danger. 

THE OLD LANDLORD AND THE NEW. 

Honest and thoroughly English words are landlord 
and landlady, and used to fit what they were meant 
for, like Alexandre's gloves. They name a pair of 
bread-keepers and loaf-givers who feed travelers. In 
fact, in a nice, white wheaten sense, they are a brace 
of loafers. But in pretentious hotels the landlady is 
about as nearly extinct as the mastodon. She has been 
succeeded by the housekeeper. The landlord is not 
utterly abolished, but he is often gilt-edged, bound in 
Turkey and profusely illustrated. Ko longer does he 
carve the succulent pig and the noble roast. ISTo 
longer do the fowls, breasted like dead knights in 
armor on a monument, fall to pieces beneath the 
dexterous hints of the carving knife. No longer, 



"MI^STE INN." 95 

when the guests are served, does he wash his hos- 
pitable hands in invisible water before their e3^es, and 
wish that " good digestion may wait on appetite, and 
health on both." He is succeeded by a clerk and a 
steward. 

In the dining-room swarm a head-waiter and his 
underlings in black and white, to wit : faces and 
aprons, who stand behind your chair and regard your 
organ of self-esteem and look down the back of your 
neck, .and watch your fork and your spoon and your 
plate and yourself, and never wink once. When you 
have done they have done. They know you as an 
omnivorous animal ctb ovo usque ad inctlci — from the 
Qgg to the apples. JSTo need to say or sing, " Get 
thee behind me, Satan," for that is the mischief of 
it : he is there already and all the time. 

The first landlord I ever saw is but just dead, and 
he was an old man in the beginning — my beginning. 
He kept a stage-house on the old State Road, as far 
north as the Black River Country. It was an old- 
time inn with a long, low, hospitable stoop, pulled 
down over the lower row of front windows like a 
broad-brimmed hat, a world too big, fallen over an 
urchin's eyebrows. Along the wall beneath this stoop 
was a hospitable bench. Within the wide door was. 
the bar-room, with a great hospitable Franklin and 
chuckle-headed andirons with slender crooked necks 
craning away from the maple logs as if they were 
afraid of burning their brains out. Across the room 
from the fiery cavern was " the bunk," a seat by day 



96 SUMMER-SAVORY. 

and a bed by night. Above it hung a stage-driver's 
whip, with an open-mouthed tin horn in the act of 
swallowing the handle, and the stock coiled about 
like the hapless Laocoon by a long and snaky lash 
with a pink-silk tail. Beside the whip a shaggy 
overcoat, a long red muffler, a buffalo robe, and a 
tin lantern tattooed like a Polynesian. Upon the 
wall the tatter of an old menagerie show-bill, where 
a spotted leopard, partly loosened from the plaster, 
wagged his tail in a strangely familiar way in the 
little breaths of air from the ever-opening door. But 
the marvel of the place was the bar — a cage of tall, 
sharp pickets, and within it " black spirits and white, 
blue spirits and gray." In the fence was a wicket 
window that lifted like a portcullis ; and upon the 
little ledge beneath it a half-grown tumbler of green 
glass was set forth, and a portly decanter of some 
amber liquid, wherein rolled lazy lemons or cherries, 
or sprigs of tansy a little pale from drowning — or a 
blood-red port that came across the sea, or something 
bluish from the Indies. "Crusaders" were not yet. 

In the dining-room there w^ere no sable waiters, 
and no bills of fare with impossible combinations of 
letters naming improbable things, but good and 
abundant food — sugar that looked as if it had been 
quarried, and white as Parian marble ; pure coffee fit 
for Turks, and tea for mandarins ; and withal a 
hearty welcome. When bedward bound, a pair of 
sheepskin slippers were produced from a closet in the 
bar, and " the brief candle " that Shakspeare mentions. 



"MINE INN." 97 

and you were shown to a bed fat as Falstaff, to which 
whole flocks of geese paid feathery tribute. Mat- 
tresses were not yet. 

That first landlord was a hero to me. He linked 
the small village to the big world. He was to 
strangers what the mayor is now. He extended them 
the freedom of the city for two shillings a meal. 
There were shillings as well as "giants in those 
(lays." By the way : when an American tradesman 
tells you an article is a shilling, knowing that a single 
shilling is a fiction and a delusion, he is joking at 
your expense, and lacks but very little of being an 
honest man, for he comes within half a cent of it! 
5 



I 



CHAPTER XI 



CARAVAN. 

T was from that old village stage-house the writer 
went abroad, — to Bengal, Asia, Africa and the 
Brazils, — went and returned the same da}^! Attached 
to the inn was a shed for the sheltering of farmers' 
horses on rainy days and Sundays. Through that 
shed wide doors opened into a stable-yard, walled in 
on all sides by barns. In that yard the Caravan was 
exhibited. Think of that, ye Barnums and Fore- 
paughs of the four-footed and far-fetched ! The ring 
for the pony and his smutty-faced Darwinian rider 
was tan-barked oiF in the middle of the small area; 
the cages were drawn up around like a corral ; the 
elephant was in the great barn, with a chain about 
his hind-foot, marking time, but never marching, after 
the manner of chained elephants, and feeling through 
the cracks between the loose boards overhead for 
stray wisps of hay. And so, for a silver shilling, I 
went to foreign lands. 

Everybody has a golden age. It is childhood. 
Mankind and poultry are alike, — both happiest and 
tenderest when spring chickens. In the golden age 
happiness is the cheapest thing going. You have 



THE CARAVAK. 99 

seen the time you could buy it for sixpence, and 
have change coming. I have bought perfect bliss for 
a cent. It looked like a basswood whistle, but it was 
bliss. The E-ilat bugle of that lark among players 
in the Marine Band at Washington never sounded 
half so sweet to me as that bit of piping basswood. 
The day I am writing of, happiness cost one shil- 
ling, and every village boy got the worth of his 
money. 

There was a hyena that looked a little like a fam- 
ished and angry hog, with a hoarse, rough snort, like 
a saw-mill. He snapped at the keeper when he 
touched him with a rawhide; snapped when he gave 
him his dinner. In fact, the keeper said the creature 
could act more like a human being than any other 
beast in the Cai^avan. Ingratitude generally goes on 
two feet, but here it had taken to all fours, and 
turned quadruped. 

THE HEAD KEEPER. 

The head keeper inspired us with great respect, 
and we thought he had captured the beasts with his 
own hand. He had a red face, and a loud voice 
with a brogue and an E, in it. When he roused a 
great fellow in a striped jacket he said, "Ladies and 
gentlemen, this is the R-royal Bengal tiger-r of Asia, 
nine year-rs owld," and the subject of the biography 
gave &, growl. " He is car-rnivor-rous and cr-ruel as 
the gr-rave, and is said to have devour-red sever-ral 
women and childr-ren in his native jungles. He was 



100 SUMMER-SAVORY. 

taken when full gr-rown and subdued with r-red hot 
ir-rons." Here there was a sensation in the audience, 
and the tiger swung open his jaws that creaked in 
the hinges with a sort of rusty growl, displayed a 
set of cutlery, and gave a great yawn, as if he were 
tired of the account of himself. But then he had 
heard it before, and we never had. It was all new 
to us, and horrible and good ! 

THE LIONS. 

And so the keeper made the tour of the monsters 
of foreign lands, and threw us little ragged scraps 
of Goldsmith's Animated ISTature, much as he fed 
the animals after a while with poor beef. He stirred 
up the lion, and when Leo shook himself and stood 
up on his feet, what with his imposing front lighted 
with two great yellow eyes, his mighty mane, and 
not much of any hody to back it up, he looked like 
a four-footed head. Nature took so much pains with 
the hair that she seems to have hurried the work 
and brought the beast to a premature end. That 
hair not only saves the lion from contempt, but in- 
sjDires respect for what would otherwise be a much 
exaggerated and unpleasant cat. Touched up and 
rounded out, here and there, with abundant curls, the 
color of Petrarch's Laura's tresses, he looks stately as 
a full-wigged lord-mayor of London, and wise enough 
to sit upon the Queen's Bench. 

The young lion of Timnath that Samson unhinged, 
if we may believe the old Bible picture, and made a 



THE CARAVAN. 101 

bee-hive of, and propounded the first recorded riddle 
thereon, " out of the eater came forth meat, and out 
of the strong came forth sweetness," and offered every- 
body two and a-half dozen shirts if they found it out 
in a week, — that lion was put to the nexj best use 
that lion could possibly be; the very best being to 
catch him and cage him and show him to boys! 
Rampant, he shows well on royal arms. As an em- 
blem he is splendid, but personally he is unwholesome 
and discreet. When the ass masqueraded in a lion's 
skin, he had the best of the beast on his shoulders. 

There are several kinds of lions the keeper never 
named. There are the lion of St. Mark, and Gustavus 
Adolphus the lion of the north, and the Cape of Good 
Hope the lion of the sea, and Richard Coeur de Lion, 
and ^sop's lion that the mouse befriended, and the 
British lion. The keeper had only one variety, but 
he made the most of him, for he let him begin to 
swallow him, by putting his head into the beast's 
mouth, and he bade him roar. A sound like a wind 
in a cave sent a chilly wave down our unaccustomed 
spinal marrows. Somehow we seemed to hear it with 
the " small of the back ! " Then the man looked as 
complacent as if he himself had done the roaring, 
and our nervous start gave him great delight, and we 
were glad because we had been scared, and so every- 
body was satisfied. There are many lions not dwell- 
ing in deserts and not kept in cages. 



102 SUMMER'SAVORY. 

LEOPARDS AND THEIR HUMAN LIKES. 

Then the keeper thrust his whip into the leopards' 
cage, and they leaped over it to and fro, to and fro, 
as lightly as a yellow-bird flies over a currant-bush. 
How gracefully they walked, with a long free stride, 
as we think Apollo walked when he went forth for 
a little archery practice. They purred like the hum 
of a little wheel, and their fawn-colored fur was dotted 
off with clusters of black cherries, and their throats 
were as white as a lady's chemisette, and their long, 
fine whiskers were just a stealthy touch longer than 
their bodies were wide, so that what the feelers could 
not clear the bodies wouldn't try to. The velvet in the 
foot and the nerve in the whisker told w4iat they werd 
made and meant for! There are folks, whose family 
name is not leopard, with the sensitive mustache and 
the still step. They never make a bold break, but go 
feeling noiselessly about. The best way to trust them, 
is to make a Thomas of yourself and doubt them. 

About feet: forget a mule's ears and look at his 
feet. No Arabian barb ever had a foot so small and 
lady-like. It is as handsome as a sea-shell. There 
is a belief that small feet do not naturally belong 
to large understandings. They say that great men 
almost always have large feet, tliough large men 
often get about in " number fives." However this 
may be, there is something lacking in a hale, hearty 
man who goes shuffling about the streets in slipj^ers, 
and I don't think it is leather. A Christian boy's 



THE CAKAVAN. 103 

first manly aspiration is boots. Ethan Allen would 
hardly have chucked Ticonderoga into his game-bag 
just by asking for it. It was less a question of battle 
than of boots and breeches. What could the bare- 
footed, Highlander-legged commander of the' rugged 
old fortress do, when summoned, but surrender and 
dress himself? He might have been brave as several 
Csesars, but what if Allen had trodden on his toes 
with those jack-boots of his ! Figuratively and liter- 
ally, a man is manliest in boots. You hear his com- 
ing; the firm, unmuffled step. His trail is not dim, 
like a savage's. He makes a legible track. There is 
nothing of stealth or long whisker or velvet feet about 
him. In nature and in name he is not a leopard. 

THE ELEPHANT — THEN AND SINCE. 

Then the big barn-doors were opened, and an ele- 
phant, — it was Romulus or Columbus or Hannibal, — • 
was led forth by a man armed with a pike-staff, and 
all the boys held their breath. Two dusty leather 
aprons without strings were hung each side of his 
head for ears, and two small crevices for eyes were 
punctured in the smoky plaster dead wall of his 
countenance ; and he carried a couple of tusks at 
trail arms in front of him, and his tail depended like 
a bell-rope behind him, and the general expression of 
his body was that of an overgrown outdoor oven, and 
he went around the ring in a make-haste-slowlj^, sham- 
bling way. Then he knelt, and his backbone was 
lined with little boys as thick as they could stick, and 
he got up, a fourth at a time, and when he was all 



104 SUMMER-SAVORY. 

up and had given tlie fellows a short ride, he was 
commanded to shake them off. The ashen hide, 
rigged upon rollers, apparently, for the sake of equal- 
izing the wear, rolled around him a couple of times 
at the word, and those boys fell off like apples from 
a clubbed tree, and scudded back into the crowd like 
quails into tall grass. Then the keeper lay upon his 
tusks, as in an ivory cradle, and was rocked up and 
down in an airy and oriental way. Last, we were told 
about the elephant's sagacity and tenderness and gen- 
eral loftiness of character, and a number of other 
qualities that he never was guilty of, and the creature 
spoke for himself and lifted his trunk and trumpeted, 
and shambled back to the barn and drank a barrel 
of water. We have all seen the elephant since. Some 
of us have had one, and it has generally proved the 
most costly and worthless of all our possessions. An 
elephant in the parlor has been known to eat up the 
owner's kitchen and credit. An elephant in the state 
has beggared the people. An elephant of a doctrine 
in the church has given it more trouble sometimes 
than all the religion it could muster. Elephants gen- 
erally are architecturally Gothic and spiritually Goths. 

THE MONKEY. 

The charm and wonder of the day came last. Into 
the ring dashed a Shetland pony, all mane and tail 
and lively as a grig, and upon him " Captain Jack," — 
not the Modoc, but the monkey. The sooty-faced bur- 
lesque was in uniform of a curious combination of 
cut and color, for wOiile the coat was a wide-flapped 



THE CARAVAN". 105 

old Continental affair, it flared as red as a British 
trooper's jacket, and the tip of a tail showing below 
the skirt behind gave a sinister, not to say satanic, 
touch to his figure. Upon his head, that bobbed 
about like a cocoanut in rough water, was a cocked 
hat with a feather in it. And this fellow handled 
the reins and stood erect upon the saddle, while the 
master's whip cracked like a pistol, and around the 
ring the pony buckled, and the bugles blew and the 
drums rolled, and the crowd shouted and everybody 
was pleased and nobody was ashamed to show it. 
Monkeys are just as popular and quite as absurd as 
they ever were, but people regard them covertly, out 
of the corners of their eyes. " Captain Jack " has 
ceased to be a hero. How we all envied that monkey 
the possession of the pony ! I think we could have 
mustered a dozen boys who were in doubt whether 
'they would rather have the monkey without the pony, 
or he the monkey and have the pony ! For three 
mon ths we all " played caravan " on Saturday after- 
noons. We were tigers, lions and leopards by turns. 
The biggest of us made poor elephants, while the 
most of us were fleet of foot as the Shetlander ; but 
in one thing we were a triumph, for we all made 
excellent monkeys! 

Gone is the old Caravan. The elephant unpacked 
his trunk long ago, but among all my landlord's guests 
none hold a brighter place in memory than the guests 
that halted in the barnyard, for so it was that I went 
to Bengal, Asia, Africa and the Brazils. 



CHAPTEE XII. 



EXCURSIONS. 



EXCURSIO]^ means getting out of yourself in a 
liurrj. That is what everybody is doing in 
summer days. A man will make a more violent eflPort 
to rest than to do anything else under the snn. And 
it is a luxury because he makes it for nothing, while 
the average efforts of his life are made for money. 
When the excursion fit is on, it is n-ot the least like 
hydrophobia, for everybody, takes to water like a duck, 
— salt water, fresh water, spring water, mineral water, 
cold water, hot water, and if not water then mount- 
ains. He turns into a chamois, and goes skipping 
among the cliffs. When a man is about to rest, he 
sits up all night to be ready to go in the morning. 
He is whisked otf fifty or a hundred miles, and trod- 
den on 'and rained on, and squeezed and punched, 
and he spoils his hat, and his shirt-collar wilts, and 
he is half-starved, and he sees water and pays five 
dollars and is happy. But he has a girl with him, — 
perhaps an old one, perhaps not. And she wears a 
white dress and a blue sash and a saucy hat, and her 
hair flies, and little rivers of dusty perspiration are 
mapped upon her pretty face, and she wilts like a 
morning-glory. 

106 



ExcuKsioisrs. 107 

Trains pass every day bound for Niagara, Chautau- 
qua Lake, Watkins Glen, — everywhere. One of thirty- 
six cars and half a mile long, pushed and pulled by 
a couple of engines that looked as if they were quar- 
reling about w^ho should have the train, passed yester- 
day. It carried twenty-two hundred excursionists, 
who represented at least five thousand dollars' worth 
of solid comfort and profound rest. They hung out of 
windows and piled upon platforms like swarms of 
young bees upon apple-tree limbs. Their faces were 
Mndened out with satisfaction, — they looked as crum- 
pled as tea-leaves, and were as dusty as millers. They 
had a band with them, marked like a flock of bobolinks, 
and you heard the trombone growling in his sleep. 

" JACK." 

The man is always on board who wears his best 
clothes and his other hat. He looks like a tailor's 
pattern that has been stepped on in a damp day. 
His hat is the color of a badger, he has got a cinder 
in his eye. some heel has had a snap at one of his 
patent-leathers and left a little semicircle of what 
looks like teeth-prints, he has lost his handkerchief, 
and furtively wipes his happy face with a coat-cufl". 
He has stood up for the last twenty miles. He might 
have edged in, if he could have found an edge of him- 
self anywhere, but he was afraid somebody would oft'er 
to sit on him, and he should wrinkle his coat-skirts, 
and make the knees of his pantaloons look like a 
couple of stove-pipe elbows. Such people would be 



108 SUMMER-SAVORY. 

handier if the ends of a kettle-bail were slipped into 
their ears, that so they might be hung up out of harm's 
way. 

" GILL." 

There is the woman to match him, — the Gill of the 
Jack aforesaid. She is attired at once in company 
dress, and company manners. She looks as if she had 
been sent to the laundry by mistake, — washed, half- 
dried, and never ironed. She pulls herself together 
on this side and that with an air, when anybody jostles 
her. But then if she didn't want to be squeezed, she 
shouldn't have been a lemon. 

Yonder is a man in an Ulster duster, whose mate- 
rial once sported blue blossoms. It is linen, and he 
is sensible ; but then it hangs about him much as 
if he had clothed himself in a loose family umbrella, 
and altogether he resembles a specimen of unhusked 
corn with a withered ear in it. Like Desdemona's 
handkerchief, he is " too little." There, is a lady under 
a low-browed straw roof, as comfortable to live in as 
a maple shadow in a sultry day. Here is a girl with 
her elegant apparel pinned back so far that you might 
think she was dressed for posterity, instead of the pres- 
ent generation. Had she pinned her garments back 
a trifle farther, she would have left home without 
them, and worn something more becoming. She has 
declined three chances to sit down. But yonder is a 
pair in cool, clean linen throughout, dust-proof, and 
pleasant to look at as a couple of water-lilies. 



EXCURSIONS. 109 



THE POETEY OF PICNICS. 



Excursions frequently end in that disaster called a 
picnic. A sublime contempt for comfort, and plenty 
of spirits, are essential to its enjoyment. The particular 
brand referred to is "Youthful Spirits." If a man 
hasn't a boy in his jacket, — if a woman has traveled 
life's road so long that she is out of sight of herself 
in pantalets and calico frock, then let the twain read 
this authentic history of picnics and remain at home. 

Quite everybody now is munching something under 
a tree, that is such a mixture of cake, sandwiches, 
pickles, and cheese, that it has about as many flavors 
as that blessed city of Cologne had odors, not one of 
which was cologne. The munching is diversified by 
discovering long-bodied ants in the jelly-cup, — ants 
that instead of "going to^'' as directed in the Bible, 
you immediately go for. Then Uncle Toby's fly, that 
he sweetly said there was room for, is floating in the 
iced tea ; and one of those darting spiders that out- 
lines chain-lightning has you by the nape of the neck ; 
and a wood-tick has begun to picnic on that part of 
you commonly called calf, as if, considering where you 
have been "left" to go, the tick could have nibbled you 
any^\\Q\Q without encountering veal ! Then the log 
where you sit is about as pleasant as a moss-grown 
fog-bank would be, and a bug has gone into " the 
fearful hollow " of your ear, and a catarrh has entered 
your head, and you wet your feet in the boat, and 
you are so mussed and mottled with two kinds of jam 



110 SUMMEE-SAVORY. 

that you resemble a New Zealander in full tattoo, 
after a, fight. You wear good clothes and take good 
victuals, and spoil them all. And then it rains! 
You get under a tree, but, as with a pea-straw roof, it 
rains harder there than anywhere else ; and you begin 
to show out your character by turning green where 
you knelt in the splashed grass. But that brand of 
spirits sustains you, and the more mishaps there are, 
the jollier you grow. In a word, the misery of the 
thing is the pleasure of it. 

Picnics are sometimes made for the "benefit" of 
some good cause, but never of the performers. That 
pitiful picture of poor Mrs. Rogers, " nine small chil- 
dren and one at the breast," following Mr. Rogers 
on his way to the stake, was a sort of picnic with 
one martyr, while in the picnics I write of there are 
many. 

There is an aboriginal streak in men and women, 
a bit of undeveloped savage. Thus a number of resi- 
dents of La Porte, Indiana, went and camped out 
for a week in plain sight of the city ! It was a sort 
of chipyard picnic. Had they been houseless gj'p- 
sies, it would have been no marvel, but they all de- 
serted comfortable homes, and, like Nebuchadnezzar, 
went out to grass without being turned out. It was 
a little like going to the washtub to fish. 

Seriously, there may be worse social devices than 
picnics. They let stilted people down and timid peo- 
ple out, for a bashful man is never so bold as in 
that well-dressed and well-disposed mob called a pic- 



EXCURSIONS. _ 111 

nic party. And then they act more like themselves 
out-of-doors in the woods than they do in parlors. 
People who eat rice by the kernel with a fork, and 
taste things here and there in a delicate way, delight 
to return to primeval fingers, and bravely grasp a 
drumstick or gnaw some other bone. They act as 
live clams do that you keep in the cellar sometimes. 
When in the dark they open their uneloquent mouths, 
but the moment you approach with a light, click, click, 
go the closing bivalves, and they are all snug as an 
oyster again. Some persons are clams. It is only 
in the shady places of picnics that you really see 
and hear them at all. Only there can it be said of one 
of them, clmnavit. 



CHAPTER XIII. 



THE "NORTH WOODS" MEETING-HOUSE. 

V T SEE the church, — "meeting-house" then, — in 
JL the village of Lowville, as it stands on the edge 
of my life's eastern horizon. It was humble as a barn, 
but hallowed as an altar. The pulpit, with the archi- 
tecture of a grain-bin and two stories high, — they 
kept the fuel in the lower one, — was about big enough 
for the twelve disciples to meet in. )A broad ledge 
ran all around it, whereon the Bible and the hymn- 
book had place. Not an inch of carpet or velvet or 
cushion anywhere about it, if we except a little cush- 
ion of green cloth, plump with the plumage of geese, 
and looking like a young feather-bed not quite ripe. 
It was as guiltless of upholstery as Haman's gallows. 
For a time the Sunday-school library was piled in one 
corner. The entrance to it was by a little closed 
stairway. The minister went in and up and was out 
of sight, for whoever sat down in that pulpit was in- 
visible till he stood up. A bench of unpainted wood 
was fastened along the wall for the minister and his 
" visiting brethren." And what a shining host at one 
time and another have I seen there ! — Kendrick, 
Peck, Bennett, Card, Cook, Cornell, Galusha, Smit- 

112 



THE "NORTH WOODS" MEETING-HOUSE. 113 

zer, Moore, Morgan, Hascall, Comstock, Elliott. They 
make me think of the big trees of California. They 
were few, but how mighty they were ! A formidable 
breastwork had that pulpit, and fronting it like a bat- 
tlement was the gallery where stood and sang the 
choir. 

(_ My father led the choir, I can see the wooden 
pitch-pipe, with a mouth like a whip-poor-will, — I 
saw it a few months ago, blackened with age, and 
treasured for the lips that have touched it, — as he 
adjusted it to some letter where "mi is in E," or 
some other member of the musical alphabet, and blew 
a slender note that had a plaintive cry something like 
a plover's, and they all "pitched in" and sang one of 
the golden songs of day before yesterday, while Sister 
Green rose and fell with the notes as she stood, like 
a boat at its moorings lifted by the tide. There was 
a girl in that choir from the " Number Three " road 
that always matched her eyes with her ribbons, and 
the ribbons were always blue. She seemed to me 
about the sweetest singer in all Israel. Where are 
the eyes and the tones to-day? I fear me those have 
grown cloudy and these sad since then. Let us hope 
not. 

For some reason well known to my father, and so 
I never mentioned it to him, a place was assigned me, 
during the services, in that gallery, and within easy 
reach of his paternal hand. I didn't sing. I never 
could sing. When I do sing, I depart into waste, 

places. \ Admiring many tunes, I was never suffi- 

! 5* 



114 SUMMER-SAVORY. 

cientlj familiar with any of them to take liberties 
and call them by name, except Yankee Doodle, Hail 
Columbia, Ode to Science, Bonaparte Crossing the 
Rhine, — is he crossing it yet? — "and such." But I 
knew Mear and Old Hundred and Heber's Hymn, 
and all the rest of them, enough to love them when 
I heard them, and passing sweet did they sound to 
me then, — yesterday, to-day and forever. 

Just behind me was the bass-vioJ, played upon by 
a Christian man whose memory is yet sweet, — Me- 
lancthon Merrill, of the "West Eoad." That carnal 
instrument, portly and florid, was not admitted into 
that gallery without argument. Some of the silver- 
gray brethren and sisters would have had no objec- 
tion to psaltery and harp, and even tinkling cymbals, 
for were they not all Bible instruments wherewith to 
make " a joyful noise " before the Lord ? — but that 
father of fiddles, — well, they associated it with the 
corn-pop measures of Money Musk, and the total de- 
pravity of " The Devil among the Tailors," and the 
profane rhyme of " Old Rosin the Bow," if old Rosin 
was old enough. 

As I remember it. Elder Blodgett read psalms and 
hymns as we are commanded to sing them, — "with 
the spirit and the understanding," — read them as if 
they were something he loved and believed in, and 
wanted everybody else to do likewise. You have 
heard some terrific reading. So have I. Witness the 
man whom I heard "give out" the hymn, and you 
may judge how he read it by what he said about it : 



THE "isTORTH WOODS" MEETIKG-HOUSE. 115 

"Sing the two fust vusses and the three last," as if 
the hymn were a hay-fork at one end and a trident 
at the other. Perhaps the order of importance in the 
clergyman's mind should be, first the text; second 
the prayer; third the praise; last the sermon. Make 
this universal, and there will be less hustling through 
the hymn, as a brisk fellow wipes his feet on a husk 
door-mat. 

C In those old days I think there were none in the 
choir but "professors." But in the Presbyterian stone 
church up the street, — the Baptist edifice was noth- 
ing but wood, — you could not quite distinguish the 
saints from the singers in the choir, because they had 
all been sprinkled into salvation in the genesis of 
things, — " in the beginning.") But I fancy they should 
have let the sinners sing. It might have been good 
for them. Praise is next to prayer. 

By the way : do you know any civilized places 
where they have sacrilegiously degraded " Ninety-and- 
Nine," "Hold the Port," and "Jesus of ]^azareth 
Passeth By," to dancing-tunes under the thin title of 
waltzes? I do. To steal a communion service for the 
purposes of a drinking bout would be a companion 
picture. 

V^The beauty of that old meeting-house was invisible 
to the natural eye. It had none at all. It was as 
angular as an elbow, and as square as a checker-board. 
Its 'frescoes are all memories. The grace of its pews 
was lent by them who sat therein. Under the brow 
of the mighty pulpit sat Deacon Bachelder and Dea- 



116 SUMMER-SAVORY. 

con Moses Waters. One was a fine specimen of a 
lean deacon, and the other as rotund as one of his 
own Pound Sweetings, for he was the man who 
gave me Rhode Island Greenings out of his Sunday- 
noon lunch, wrapped in a clean red bandana handker- 
chief. I see tlie men and women and slips of girls 
and boys, a goodly company, in the garments of forty 
years ago. I see green calashes and Vandykes and 
hats of beaver, and cloaks with overlapping capes like 
scales upon a speckled trout, and gowns with balloons 
of sleeves, and high waists and skirts hanging like 
flags in calms, and low morocco shoes with glint of 
buckles," and caps with borders like white moonbeams 
frilled. I see the long tune-books fluttering along 
the top of the gallerj^ as they opened them to the 
tune. I hear footstoves tinkling down the aisle in 
winter, each swung in a black-gloved hand by its little 
bail. I smell caraway and roses and dill in the sum- 
mer. I smell crape both summer and winter, for alas ! 
Death "hath all seasons for his own." I hear voices 
that have died forever out of a voiceful world. I hear 
the simple, fervent, childlike petition of Elder Blod- 
gett. I see the dusty slants of the afternoon sunshine 
sloping down through the western windows. I hear 
them sing 

Praise God from whom all blessings flow; 

Praise Him all creatures here below; 

Praise Him above, angelic host; 

Praise Father, Son and Holy Ghost! 



THE "NORTH WOODS" MEETIKG-HOUSE. 117 

As the congregation rises, I hear the rustling of 
garments like a breath of wind in a' leafy wood. I 
hear the Elder with outspread hands pronounce the 
benediction : " ISTow may the grace of our Lord Jesus 
Christ be with you all forevermore, Amen ! " And 
so that goodly congregation pass slowly out with hand- 
clasps as they leave the doors. They have almost all 
gone out of life. The dear voices in the gallery are 
quite all hushed. Dust upon lips, dust upon brows, — 
everywhere dust ! 

And the gentle, faithful shepherd of the old-time 
flock has departed. "The prayers of David, the son 
of Jesse, are ended ! " 



I 



CHAPTER XIY. 



WINKS AND WINKERS. 

LOYE an even winker, wliere the fringed lids come 
down like little sleeps, and then lift regularly off. 
JSTot lazily, but firmly, if it may be said of a thing 
so delicate as a live window-curtain. It betokens the 
staid and quiet temperament of a man not easily 
moved, but when moved, strong. Distrust a man's 
nerve who, when thwarted or opposed, gives long 
shivering winks with both eyes, like an ox threat- 
ened over the head with a goad. The woman who 
snaps her eye-lashes as if they were whips will never 
be successfully likened to " Patience on a monument. " 
Boys sometimes call them " eye-lashers," and that 
names hers precisely. 

My neighbor across the way has a single wink if 
he is pleased at what you say, or pleased at what he 
says. If he utters a smart thing, wank goes that eye 
as if he had fired off his joke with it, and you hap- 
pened to see the flash. But it is always the 7'ight 
eye. I have just been trying it with the left eye, 
but it isn't so handy. The lid does not shut down 
so much like a percussion lock, nor fly open so easily. 
People are Y\^\t-eyed as well as right-handed. We 

118 



WINKS AND WINKERS. 119 

are conscious that when we want to bore a hole in 
an obscure sentence, so as to see through it, the right 
eye is the tool we do it with. 

When some people are trying to remember a thing, 
they give five or six winks as fast as possible, as if 
they would thus fan the smouldering recollections into 
a blaze, and then they intermit. They are fluttering 
winkers. 

The locomotive, like the Cyclops, has but one head- 
light, and I am glad of it. Just fancy an engine 
with two round O's of eyes side by side, glaring 
through the night, and trailing its jointed body, sin- 
uous as a sea-serpent, with its shining square scales, and 
something like a glittering fin lying along the back ! 
It would frighten civilization out of sight. When a 
man has two right eyes, and I mistrust very few have, 
he is about as well equipped as an observatory. He 
is a telescope of himself. One of the most popular 
speakers in the State, and one of the wittiest withal, 
used to lower his right eyelid when he drove an ar- 
gumentative nail home, and clinched it with a ham- 
mer-headed story. The laugh in that eye set off the 
audience like a spark of fire in a bag of gunpowder. 
The left eye seemed to be left out of the transaction 
entirely. I am afraid my neighbor of the single 
wink is not as noble as a Roman. That one wink 
shuts the cover down upon all hope of his nobility, 
and smothers it, but a woman with that lonely wink 
is — well, whatever she is, she is not a lady. 

It is wonderful how much you can find out about 



120 SUMMER-SAVOEY. 

a man by watcliiilg the way he uses his handy eye- 
lid. When he employs it to hint with, there is a 
trace of fox in him. Contemplate George Washing- 
ton's square block of a face, and fancy his right eye 
giving a cunning wink ! It would extinguish your 
respect, besides half frightening you to death. Vol- 
untary winkers are not troubled with courage. A 
flap of the lid is stealthier and safer than a swing of 
the tongue. There is a proverb, a little coarse and 
very old, about a wink being as good as a kick. It 
is better, for it is possible to commit assault and bat- 
tery with an eyelid. It is cheaper ruffianism than a 
fist, and there is no law against it. It is the mean- 
est weapon a man can carry, and calls for legislation. 



CHAPTEE XY. 



HUMAN FIGS. 



THE people who have reared large families of chil- 
dren without any boys and gMs among them are 
unfortunate. There are such people. A child with- 
out any childhood is a miserable little animal, and 
the poorest compliment that can be paid to a boy — 
if it is a true one — is that he is "a little man." I 
have read somewhere — perhajjs it is a mistake — that 
a fig makes its appearance npon the tree a Jig, suf- 
fering no progressive changes except to grow bigger. 
Once a fig, always a fig. I do not think we want 
any more human figs. First the baby, then the breezy 
boy, then the boots, then the bother, then the young 
man, then the hope of the homestead — that is the 
good old-fashioned order of development. Not hav- 
ing the delight of sitting under my " own vine and 
fig-tree," perhaps my knowledge of Jigs is imperfect,, 
but yet I insist upon the hoy. We do not want him 
wise and profound and owl-like and right angle-tri- 
angled. What becomes of the precocious children 
seven or eight years older at their heads than they 
are at their heels? Once in a hundred times do they 
6 121 



122 SUMMER-SAVORY. 

turn into anything at all — say into men? Call the 
roll and see. 

The writer knew a boy who never learned to swim 
because the water will drown, — never learned to ride 
a horse because horses run away, — never touched a 
gun because powder explodes, — never played with the 
boys because he would tear his clothes, — never got 
farther than " barn-ball," which means throwing a 
ball at the gable and catching it when it returns. 
He played that — and they let him- — because he could 
play it alone. In fact, in pretty nearly all his plays 
he had a "lone hand." 

Then there were several " becauses," that were 
never explained. He never went to children's par- 
ties, because . He never went sleigh-riding with 

the girls, because . He never learned to skate, 

because . Somebody exclaims, What did the fel- 
low know? Was he an idiot? By no means. He 
could fulminate Pitt's reply to somebody about "the 
atrocious crime of being a young man," and repeat 
" Campbell's Pleasures of Hope," and " My name is 
Norval." He knew some Latin and some Greek, and 
a little about Jupiter and the Styx ; but the sticks 
he knew most about were sticks of stove-wood that 
he piled in the wood-house on Saturday afternoons, 
when other boys were kicking up their heels in a 
frolic. Not that he was ever overworked. By no 
means. He had the kindest father and the most lov- 
ing mother in all Christendom, but then he was to 
be a little fig. Boy nature cropped out, and he fell 



HUMAN FIGS. 123 

in love with a girl. Of course, like Desdemona's 
handkerchief, he was " too little " for any such non- 
sense, and so an extinguisher night-cap was put upon 
the flicker of flame, and out it went ! 

'Now this boy, as I have heard, was not an unhappy 
boy. He had a blessed childhood, but the trouble 
was, he peopled that childhood with things of iiis 
own creation. He dreamed in the daytime. He grew 
sensitive, timid, shy. He was not like the kind of 
turtle whose voice "is heard in the land," but the 
other sort, that draws its head into its shell and never 
says a word. He fell in love again, with a woman 
old enough to be his — aunt, and who thought no 
more about him than she would think of a tree-frog:. 
He fell in love with — it sounds incredible, and is 
absurd, but it is true — with her black stockings ! 
That color, of all others, in or out of the solar spec- 
trum ! He was fond of reading encyclopedias. He 
read Nicholson's old twelve-volume fellow by the 
month. He happened upon the article " consump- 
tion," and he had the symptoms. " The liver com- 
plaint," and that too. The article on " the heart " 
fairly scared him. His own turned over and bounded 
about after an unruly fashion, and he was sure he 
had heart-disease. In fact, he w^as a chameleon, and 
took the color of the thing he alighted upon. He 
had everything that he read human beings could 
have, except, perhaps, a young family. 

The dark was as populous as London. The dis- 
tant woods he longed to wander in, and never could, 



124 SUMMER-SAVORY. 

were tilled as full of fancies of his own make as a 
sunbeam is of midges. If he had possessed tops, 
whips, trumpets, dogs, birds, squirrels^ it is ^mma- 
terial what, if only they were material — he would 
have had something more wholesome to play with 
than idle fancies and vain imaginings. A stray dog 
followed that boy home one day — not, perhaps, with- 
out certain sly and friendly snaps of' the thumb and 
finger, for the lad had never learned to whistle — a 
small colored cur, that carried his tail to one side 
like a helm put to starboard. He smuggled him into 
the wood-house, and hid him and fed him, and man- 
aged to keep him out of sight, and the boy's mother 
aided and abetted, and the dog helped him to re- 
cover from consumption and liver-complaint and black 
stockings — and was running down his morbid fancies 
and shaking them to pieces as if they were chip- 
mucks, when, one unlucky day, that dog impudently 
barked at the boy's father ! The father exclaimed 
against the strange dog, instituted an investigation, 
condemned the boy and banished the dog, and the 
fancies returned and the unhealthy longings, and the 
evil symptoms out of the encyclopaedia. I have heard 
him say that, a quarter of a century afterward, he 
often caught himself stopping in the street to stare 
after some little dingy cur with a particularly short 
trot, and that carried his tail to starboard, and think 
of poor " Watch," who, he hopes, has gone with 
•Pope's Indian dog to some " equal sky." Dogs are 
good for boys, and so are robins and rabbits. 



HUMAN FIGS. 125 

THE USE OF USELESSNES9. 

A healthful pet for a boy, to be perfectly satisfac- 
tory, must be M'orthless financially, useless practically, 
and troublesome i^unerally. Indeed, it must be a great 
deal like the boy himself. Your average youngster 
cannot be brought to consider a cow a pet, particu- 
larly if he has to be a calf by brevet, and do the 
housekeeping for the cow. Likewise a pig. A fan- 
tailed pigeon is more to him than a coopful of the 
most industrious laying hens that ever proclaimed an 
egg. Unless he is Poor Richard's Boy ! 

As we go along in life many of us forget some- 
thing that is well worth retaining, and one of the 
most difficult things for a man to remember is this 
one fact he knew all about when he was a boy, viz : 
certain things may he very useful hecaxise they are 
utterly useless — financially. The young robin that 
opens a mouth with a nankeen lining to its boy god- 
father for the vulgar fraction of angle-worm he holds 
in thumb and finger; the pansies that make quaint 
faces at you from the garden border ; the shingle 
rooster in a macaw's jacket that the lad has fashioned 
with his knife, taking little slices from his fingers 
now and then, and with infinite clambering and 
climbing, and loss of buttons and a rent in his panta- 
loons like that in great Csesar's mantle, and peril to 
neck and limb, has fastened triumphantly upon the 
highest peak of the barn ; the clipper mill on the 
top of the wood-shed that runs at the wind's will, 
and faces about to catch it like a distracted devil's- 



126 SUMMBE-SAVORY. 

darning-needle, and grinds no grists and makes an 
idle clatter ; — all these and such as these are valu- 
able because they have no value at all. 

Distrust the man who goes about with an icono- 
clastic hammer at a random swing. It is a sort of 
"skilled labor" that requires no apprenticeship, and 
not much of any brains. But, for all that, I should 
like one clip at the almanac of the immortal tallow- 
chandler and kite-flier, •' Benjamin Franklin, printer." 
Had he said a little less about silver change in that 
almanac, and a little more about lunar change, it 
might have been as well. "A pin a day a groat a 
year" is true, as pins went and groats were counted, 
but we do not want to hear it all the time. If in- 
dustry is really a virtue, then the sluggard's school- 
ma'am must be about the most virtuous individual 
in the world. Industry is a wholesome and blessed 
necessity. Like hunger, it is a piquant sauce to our 
enjoyments. Of the three men, he who need do 
nothing, he who wishes to do nothing, he who has 
nothing, the last is by far the happiest. About three 
people since Adam's time, whose name was good for 
much on a note of hand, have made a raid upon 
riches, and nobody has praised poverty so heartily as 
he who wrote his eulogy upon a table of gold that 
he had paid for and was able to keep. But do not 
let us cover the world with a penny, as they hide 
the full moon with a nickel. A sordid boy, to whom 
nothing is of value that he cannot turn into money, 
is of all boys the most pitiful. 



CIEAPTEE XVI. 



"THE HILL OF SCIENCE." 



WEBSTER'S Spelling-Book is the only Amer- 
ican classic. Give way, ye legions of poets 
and scholars, before the little books that, thick as 
locusts, swarmed and settled upon the whole land ! 
Webster is to America what Burns is to Scotland, — 
everybody knows a bit of him. You may quote Bry- 
ant at five hundred thousand intelligent men, and not 
a wink of recognition. You may name Homer to 
another five hundred thousand, and no more kindling 
interest in the eyes of a man of them than there is 
in a couple of bone buttons. 

But try them with the old Spelling-Book, battered 
and tattered. Recall the skirmish line led off by 
"Baker, Briar, Cider," that widened and lengthened 
into marching columns, and moved in a stately way 
through the book like a triumphant army. Bring 
out a fable or two from the commissary department 
that brought up the rear of that polysyllabic host. 
Mention the dreamy girl with the milking-pail, to 
whose complexion " green " was as suited as the green 
husk jacket is to the young corn, " and green it shall 
be ! " Do any of these things, and about a million 

127 



128 SUMMEK-SAVORY. 

will brighten and smile, and help you out with your 
reminiscences, and have a warmer feeling in their 
hearts for you than if you had shied at them the 
Book of Song, or Fronde's History of England, or 
Abbott's Napoleon, or any other work of poetry or 
fiction. 

But why the spell of the Spelling-Book among the 
hills? Before me is a horizon knobbed like an old- 
time vault-door. Dark and strong and grim as a 
prison, it is thirty miles away, and every knob is a 
Herkimer hill. Behind me is a swell of ambitious 
earth that was always there. I love it for its con- 
stancy, and fancy it resembles the first pictured hill 
that you and I ever saw. It embellished that Spell- 
ing-Book, and was called 

"the hill of science." 

That frontispiece is as unforgetable as the mother 
that bore you. I am disposed to think the rocky, 
w^ooded billow behind me is the original. To be sure 
it has no temple upon its summit, with Corinthian 
columns ; and no long-haired youth in a nightgown at 
its base, looking up at the risk of breaking his neck ; 
and no attenuated angel pointing the ambitious young- 
ster to the radiant steep, but then the hill is here in its 
rugged magnitude. The boy is a man, the temple a 
ruin, and the angel fled. Was it good Dr. Beattie who 
wrote those lines for "us boys" to speak, that we de- 
livered in the round-abouts with two rows of brass 
buttons down before? 



"THE HILL OF SCIEISCE." 129 

"Ah, who can tell how hard it is to climb 
The steep where Fame's proud temple shines afar? 
Ah, who can tell how many a soul sublime 
Has felt the influence of malignant star 
And waged with fortune an eternal war? " 

But then that was not precisely the way we said it, 
but in this wise: 

Ah, whdkTo. tell howard it 'tis t' climb 

The stee pwliere Fame sproud tempul shines effar; 

and then the rest of the syllables tumbled over each 
other like a flock of frightened sheep over a stone wall. 
And how dreadful it all was about the "soul sublime" 
and the "malignant star" and the "eternal waw,'^ a,s 
we rendered it, and nobody to say, " Let us have 
peace ! " But the best of it was that not a biped of 
us knew what it all meant. 

" SPEAKING PIECES." 

Those were the days when we uttered morsels of 
Demosthenes and the frisky Dr. Young and the play- 
ful Blair's Sermons, and the Devil, — John Milton's, 
— and other merry old boys. Do you remember the 
Belshazzar quake you had, when called out to — make a 
fool of yourself and the man you misrepresented? How 
you kept swallowing with nothing to eat, as if the 
"piece" you were rendering came from your stomach, 
and you were doing your best to keep it down ? Get 
out of yourself and look at yourself as you stood there, 
working with both thumbs and forefingers at the two 
outside seams of your pantaloons ; and casting scared 
glances at the girls, as if they were hungry ogres and 



130 SUMMER- SAVORY. 

jon a tender titbit ; and hearing something under the 
left side of your jacket thud^ thud, like the old-fash- 
ioned " pounder " on blue Mondays ; and snapping 
your little bow, — o as in cow, — at the school, and 
going to your seat as limp as a wet handkerchief. 
And so America is filled with orators "even until this 
day." 

ELOCUTIONARY COMPETITION. 

Writing of speaking: was it ever your blessed lot 
to give an address at an agricultural fair, or to make 
a speech at a poultry show? The writer being a prac- 
tical farmer who makes "bouts" upon foolscap with 
steel-pen plows, was unfortunately invited to address 
the farmers. But no sooner had he begun to say 
something sweet and green about rural life and glo- 
rify the farmer, and mention "the sage of Monticello," 
— meaning Thomas Jefferson, — which a good old 
lady, after the address, said she should like to get a 
root of, if it was any better than the old kind that 
grew in her " garding," — " the sage of Monticello " as 
being a farmer ; and gone on and introduced a plow- 
man by the name of Cincinnatus, who had been dead 
so long that not a soul there present knew he had ever 
been born, — no sooner had all this been done, than 
an exaggerated rooster, several feet high in his claws, 
took it into his head to crow and flap his wings like 
a couple of mainsails ; and somebody bigger and 
hoarser answered him, and that set off the turkeys 
and roused the geese and rallied the ducks. Then 
there would be a lull, and the unhappy speaker would 



"THE HILL Of science." 131 

proceed to give some lively statistics from the latest 
Report of the Patent Office, and be just adorning 
them, even as little Chester Whites are tricked out 
with ringlets of tails, with pleasant allusions to the 
farmers' blooming daughters there present, when a 
perverse Bantam, a dozen ounces of fowl depravity, 
would set up an incisive crow of defiance as sharp as 
a needle, and all the feathered Babel take up the 
challenge, until gobble, cackle, crow, quack and bloom- 
ing daughters were inextricably mingled. The girls 
were fairly fed out to the poultry. 

The speaker's appeal to the young men to stay in 
the country and keep up the fences was seconded by 
some malicious beast of Bashan in an adjoining stall 
who exploded all the vowels like a professor of elo- 
cution, and certain plaintive nasal Cotswolds went 
through their a, 5, ohs in concert. But when a touch- 
ing and entirely new apostrophe to the farmer's house, 
as being the one place on all the broad acres where 
the most precious stock was reared, — the boys and 
girls of the homestead, — and the crowd was just 
ready to cheer, a creature, with ear enough to equip 
a small audience with that organ, that had been 
watching the speaker from a shed near by, set up his 
hideous, sardonic laugh of two syllables united by a 
rusty hinge with a creak to it, and threw the audience 
into convulsions and covered the orator with confu- 
sion. It was one too many at once; the biped retired, 
the band played, and the base-drum drowned out the 
quadruped. 



132 STJMMEE-SAVOUY. 

I called on the execrable Bantam in his coop; the 
creature that set the- feathered tribe cackling through 
my sentences, and he was but little bigger than a 
stout robin. Anybody, no matter how diminutive, or 
how small the type you set him in, can raise a dis- 
turbance that nobody can quiet. It must just die 
out by the law of limitation. 

SQUARE STEPPERS. 

Two-footed or four-footed, everybody likes a square 
stepper. Job's horse was one of them. The Vermont 
Morgan is another. I had a chat with a wilderness 
pioneer to-day, who is never so much at home as when 
he is abroad. He has camped out so much with his 
feet to the fire that he smells smoky. It would do 
you good to see him walk. Lightly, firmly, squarely, 
just as much purpose in one foot as there is in the 
other. His tracks in the damp sand are as even as 
fine press-work. He has his philosophy of "being 
lost." When a man is cei'tain whither he is bound, 
he throws out his left foot as assuredly as he doe? 
his right, — the regular militia drill, "hay-foot, straw- 
foot"; but when there is a kink in his brain, the left 
foot, burdened with a doubt as well as a boot, takes a 
little shorter step than the right, and so, in his bewil- 
derment, he describes a curve to the left, and keeps 
coming about to the place of beginning. He ceases 
to be a square stepper. 

The feeling known as being " turned round " is 
more painful than a pain ; when the sun persists in 



"THE HILL OF SCIE]SrCE," 133 

rising in the north and setting in the south, and the 
engine of the visible universe is reversed. No reason- 
ing will set a man right and mend his broken com- 
pass; but if he will just return to the place where 
the cardinal points are in position, and then cany 
the reckoning in his head back to the doubtful re- 
gion, the horizon will swing around where it belongs, 
and the man and the world will be as nicely adjusted 
as ever. 

There is a world of left-leg marching in church 
and state. It has traced the haunts of men with 
crooked paths, and impeded true progress. Dr. Kin- 
caid, the great missionary, was a square stepper. He 
struck out upon an unknown and rugged route as if 
it had been the highway of nations. It was no left- 
foot gait that took him within ear-shot and heart- 
reach of the King of Ava. He made a march of an 
hundred years in as many days. It was a grand speci- 
men, of square stepping. Literally and figuratively, 
the left foot wants watching. 



CHAPTER XYIL 

THE COUNTRY " CORNERS." 

THE BLACKSMITH. 

THEKE is a smithy at the Corners. All day long, 
clear and cloudy, I hear the ring of hammer 
upon anvil, and the sullen roar of the fire. Saunter- 
ing over, I enter the shop. The bellows crouched 
beside the forge, with its long nose — a family nose — 
thrust in the ashes out of sight. !N^ow and then it 
lifts its back as if about to get up, but just blowing 
a long breath that brightens the fire, it lies down 
again. There are cinders, odds and ends of every- 
thing in iron, bits of steel, horse-shoes, and a water- 
trough full of tongs. 

The blacksmith is just picking up a lumbering- 
farm-horse's foot as you would pick up a penny, and 
he lays it in his leather apron, and cuts and carves 
as if he made the feet to fit the shoes. Children — 
his children — seven of them, are playing about, and 
he feeds and clothes them all wdth a hammer. It is 
a plain case of hammer and tongs. The bit of ribbon 
catching up that little girl's hair came out of the fire, 
and has not so much as the smell of smoke upon it. 
He feeds nine mouths with a mixture of nails, rings, 
horse-shoes, chains, rods, bars. For a steady diet, iron 

134 



THE COUNTRY "CORJSTEKS." 135 

and steel must be a tremendous tonic. But the black- 
smitli lias the most powerful of all tonics — the love 
of wife and children — that keeps that tired arm 
swinging and that forge glowing. 

Let us consolidate the nine mouths to be fed with 
a hammer. Let us say they will ecpial one mouth a 
foot and four inches in width — more stupendous in 
the human economy than the mouth of the Missis- 
sippi. Let the blacksmith fashion a spoon thirteen 
inches broad to fit it. Twenty mouthfuls at a meal 
are anchoritish rations for growing children. Sixty 
times a day that mighty spoon must travel from plate 
and platter, kettle and tureen, every ounce of it won 
with a hammer in a single hand. Everything they 
want and wear is multiplied by the magic number, 
nine. But never think the tired blacksmith would 
apply the arithmetical rule for " casting out the nines," 
if he could. Busy and happy as the day is long, he 
never murders time. He needs no drowsy drugs to 
sleep. He drops off like a log when the fire is out 
and the day is done. He falls into line with Tubal 
and Jubal, Elihu Burritt, E-obert Collyer and "the 
lame Lemnian," and unlike Yulcan, he is not nine 
days distant from heaven, when he is busy and all 
are well. He is a blacksmith. 

I listen to his hammer as to a pleasant bell. When 
I think what it rings for — " Shoes for baby," " Gown 
for wife," " Christmas gifts for nine, nine, nine " — 
the clink, clang, clink, grows sweet as the chimes of 
old Trinity the first time my " next best friend " and 



136 SUMMER-SAVOET. 

I heard them. It was a calm, clear summer morning. 
The great roar of the mart had not begun. Then, 
as we walked together down Broadway, with more 
years before us than there are to-day, there fell down 
through the still air, as if from another world, the 
sweet chiming of the bells in " Life let us cherish." 
It is the very tune the hammer and the anvil play ; 
and so from belfry to blacksmith, from high and low, 
the grateful bells and pulses beat — " Life let us cher- 
ish ! " 

Among the things strown about the blacksmith's 
shop are traps for such " small deer " as mink and 
fox, and now and then a bear. A trap is a pair of 
jaws and teeth waiting to catch a hody. The French- 
man said that a theory is a trap to catch a truth. It 
is gienerally the invento7\ however, that is trapped, 
and not the truth. Be this as it may, here are traps, 
and there is yet need of them. Bears are unbeara- 
bly many. There never were more in the Canton of 
Berne. They make mutton aild pork of what was 
neither before, within a stone's throw of farm-houses. 
I think a bear has a comic look, so fringed and ragged 
with fur everywhere, as if he were made coarse on 
purpose to be sold cheap, and yet with ears so round, 
close-clipped and neat, as if somebody had finished 
him off finer at one end than the other, just for a 
joke, and then laid down the shears. 

The two Old Testament bears, good for twenty 
children apiece, gave me in very early life a whole- 
some respect for bald heads and bears ! So when, in 



THE COUNTRY " CORlSrERS." 137 

broad day, one of these dogs of Herod came down 
my favorite ravine for wandering, and crossed the 
road, the bare possibility of something Bruin has since 
kept me out from among the shadows and evergreens 
of the gulf. But enough of Ursa, Major and Minor, 
lest the bear shall be a bore. 

MY FIRST BIRDS. 

Here now am I, a small volume of very modern 
history indeed, and yet I point 3^011 to that rank old 
meadow across the road, where the mower can make 
an unobstructed sweep, with nothing in the way but 
timothy and grasshoppers, and I tell you that when 
on the farther edge of boyhood I remember it a tan- 
gled swamp. 

Yillage-born, I was caught out in the country one 
soft spring evening, and passed it. The fireflies' twink- 
ling constellations had risen above it, and no cloud 
of forgetfulness has ever dimmed their beauty. Then 
out of the swamp came strange, sweet sounds, as of 
many filberts of sleigh-bells afar off, when the wear- 
ers strike into a merry trot. The first birds I re- 
member to have heard sing were frogs ! Nothing in 
all the music of childhood and manhood ever im- 
pressed me as did the trill of those fellows in green 
tights, and to this day, whenever it is heard, a feel- 
ing of loneliness and sadness, yet not of pain, pos- 
sesses me, and beside the dead, drawn by a dead 
man's horse, in a dead spring night of " the long 
ago," a boy is riding to a home now desolate, through 



138 SUMMER-SAVOEY. 

the gray and ghostly shadows, by the starry glimmer 
of fireflies, to the unstrung bells of frogs. I look up, 
and the maple is glory and the poplar gold. The 
sweeps of rain loosen the frail tenure of the leaves, 
and they snow slowly down, scarlet and crimson, 
gold and foliomort, to the M^aiting and patient and 
ever-ready earth. " We all do fade as a leaf." But 
then, " leaves have their tione to fall," but " thou 
hast all seasons for thine own, O Death ! " 

THE COUNTRY STORE. 

Just the place among these hills for the old-time 
country store that, like l^oah's Ark, contains a little 
of all sorts. You look for it at some lazy four-cor- 
ners, within hearing of an anvil's ring, and the grind 
of a mill where the creek plays in a wheel like a 
caged squirrel. And you find it, the variety store 
of a hundred years ago, where needles and crowbars, 
goose-yokes and finger-rings, liquorice-stick and leather, 
are to be had for cash or "dicker." In the corner 
yonder, stands the spindle-legged desk, behind a breast- 
work of barrels, and a bastion of codfish criss-crossed, 
a big blotter spread open upon the lid, goose-quill, 
pens, a sand-box and a pewter inkstand within reach. 

Here is the wooden bench beside the stove, covered 
with jack-knife sculpture, awkward H's like a pair 
of leaning bar-posts with one bar, and B's like ox- 
yokes. It is here that in rainy days and winter 
nights the whittlers, smokers, spitters and talkers gather 
in and lay tlieir blue-and-white mittens beneath the 



THE COUNTRY "CORNERS." 139 

stove to dry; perhaps a village doctor with his sad- 
dle-bags and pink-and-senna Bimbiis ; perhaps a coun- 
try lawyer who practices at the county bar in court 
time and the tavern bar the year around, with his 
dogmatic way and his tobacco atmosphere. Here 
Unions are saved, States constructed, stories told, and 
pig-tail gnawed. Here "fore-handed" farmers talk 
pig and potatoes, and buxom country girls smell of 
peppermint, and warm their rosy fingers that match 
their ripe cheeks for color. Here clouds of smoke 
from clay pipes float up among the bed-cords and 
brooms and tin-lanterns and cowhide boots suspended 
overhead. And the stove, with its red mouth close 
to the hearth, roars and reddens in the howling nights, 
and the black nail-heads. in the floor are worn silver- 
bright by stamping and uneasy feet. A boy, tipped 
with red as to fingers, nose, ears and toes, stands be- 
fore a short row of speckled glass jars in brimless 
hats of covers, wherein lean a few streaked sticks of 
childish happiness at a penny apiece, and gazes with 
watering mouth that keeps him swallowing in bliss- 
ful expectancy. 

THE SCHOOL-HOUSE. 

Down the road, beside a wild spring, is a stone 
school-honse with deep windows, and walls like a cas- 
tle. It is as bare of ornament as a Quaker. Neither 
map nor chart hides its walls, blank as the face of 
astonishment. The seats are a sort of wooden rheu- 
matism — right-angled, hard as Jacob's pillow in the 



140 SUMMER-SAVORY. 

wilderness, and no angel ever in sight but the school- 
ma'am. It is the very bones of the modern school- 
house. I^ow and then I wander there, for much of 
the time it is as empty as the cave of Machpelah. 
But there is something human about it that recon- 
ciles me. It smells of old geographies and spelling- 
books, and readers with ragged edges like the ears 
of "the under dog" in the fight. There is a faint 
suspicion of noontime dinners in the notched and let- 
tered desks. There are pellets of chewed paper upon 
the walls, like cannon-shot in some old fort. There 
are nightmare faces upon the seats, and beasts that 
never came out of the Ark, for they could by no 
possibility have ever got in, and prints of obliterating 
thumbs inkier than Ethiopia. 

But the limestone fortress has other uses. Nights, 
and Sundays, it is a depot for doctrines. There are 
not many varieties of Christians among the hills, and 
again there are many that seem rather to delight 
in being sinners. Bu*t for all this, during the fort- 
night I have been dreaming and looking nature full 
in the face, nature as unshaven, unshorn and unkempt 
as a Tanker, there have been seven sorts of doctrine 
set forth in the old school-house, to about the same 
congregation. Just here I rise to explain why Tun- 
ker is used instead of the name by which that sect 
is best known. Some time during the past summer, 
a grand convention of Dunkards was held in a little 
town in Illinois, and no end of papers had it that 
five thousand Drunkards were assembled, setting the 



THE COUNTEY "COKNERS." 141 

Good Templars packing their satchels for a pilgrim- 
age, in the hope of catching some of the flock before 
they could get away. 

An Episcopalian, two kinds of Methodists, a Pres- 
byterian, an Adventist, a Soul-Sleeper and a Baptist 
march in doctrinal procession through the fortnight — 
dry, damp, sprinkled, immersed; bringing prayer-books, 
hymn-books, camp-meeting songs ; preaching " each 
after his kind." What will happen to that over-fed 
company of doctrine-lappers, going through snch a 
bill of fare from grace to almonds, and apparently 
delighted with each clean plate ! " They pay their 
money, and they take their choice," but it is the 
most religiously-dissipated community extant. 

ANCIENT HISTORY. 

How would you like to be a volume of Ancient 
History, substantially bound in calf or — something 
— be live history, and go about upon two feet? In 
the hill country the chances are good for it. You 
can meet a man any day in the street, going about 
his business, who will tell you things that he saw 
in the year of grace 1800. And it will not be a 
man on three or four legs that 'vvill do it, but one 
who at sight could beat Weston at honest walking. 
Kearly every man of them is about as certain to 
have a panther, bear or wolf story, as he is to have 
a shadow when he goes out in the sunshine. " The 
almond-tree " of Ecclesiastes shines here. The order 
of the silver hair — thanks to clean water, pure air, sim- 



142 SUMMER-SAVORY. 

pie habits and a kind Providence — is as numerous 
here as in an audience the writer once had in little 
Rhodj, where quite one-half wore the silver crown. 
The congregation looked as if they had been out 
bareheaded in a snow-storm, and the flakes had not 
all melted. But they were not feeble, tremulous peo- 
ple of the "lean and slippered pantaloon," but sturdy- 
legged and full-fronted, and faces so frosty and ruddy 
that they made you think of October apples. Many 
of them had been sailors and sea-captains, and breathed 
salt air, and been drenched in salt water till they 
were fairly pickled and apt " to keep." 

WHO ARE PIONEERS'? 

"Within a month these young old boys have put 
the wilderness all back upon these cleared fields for 
me, and built up the woods, and peopled them with 
things unchristian and uncanny. They talk as ftimil- 
iarly of 1805 as if it were last week, and they fancy 
they were the first settlers. Perhaps not. Man does 
his best to make indelible evidences of his existence, 
and to leave them upon the earth. Nature Avatches 
him awhile, and then amuses herself with effacing his 
records, and sifting fine mould and seeds and leaves 
upon his highways, and smoothing over his graves, 
and the young forests spring up, cultivation relapses 
into wilderness, and the globe is as ready as a clean 
slate for a new set of pioneer boys. When the 
scouts of civilization first struck northern Indiana, 
they found forests that the sun never shone in, 



THE COUNTRY "CORKERS." 143 

where Indian trails grew dusky in the great solitude. 
They were the Christopher Colons of Indiana. But 
one day a surveyor, running a government line, strug- 
gled through twilight thickets as dense as a cane- 
brake, and broke out at once into a — vineyard! A 
breadth of some twenty acres was purple and golden 
with grapes. Choice varieties from the Rhine, they 
were brought thither by forgotten hands in some im- 
memorial year. Men had lived here then. Women 
had sung the vine-dresser's song in this wilderness. 
Children had grasped the rich clusters with stained 
fingers. Whoever they were, they had gone. The 
young forest had asserted its ancestral right to the 
old soil, and the vines had clung to it and surmounted 
the tallest trees, and swelled like the great billows of 
a green sea. Make that surveyor a little later in his 
work, and no trace would have remained of the chil- 
dren of the Rhine. But for years the new race of 
" pioneers " bore away in the mellow autumns the 
luscious produce that foreign hands had planted for 
the}'' knew not M'hom. So Nature makes room for 
the marching generations. 



CHAPTEE XYIII ' 

AQUARIUS THE WATER-BEARER. 

IT rains ! It is the paradise of Batrachians. Batra- 
cliians are frogs, and frogs are rana. Hence 
rainy, and there yon have a derivation crazier than 
Home Tooke's. The waves at Chadwick's Bay come 
galloping in from the sea like plumed troopers, and 
the white-caps " show a light " away out to the edge of 
the horizon. The broad leaves of the bass wood by my 
window droop and drip in the rain like the ears of a 
meditative hound. Little children are running to and 
fro with little yelps of delight, and a spare skirt flung 
over their heads from behind like a squirrel's tail. A 
woman stands in the door of a house with her arms 
akimbo, trying to get her eye upon one of them. 
You have met akimbo people. Their elbows are sharp. 
They are deadly weapons. Such folks should live -in 
scabbards. If she gets hold of the "one of them" 
slie will make the little midge acquainted with the 
stern realities of life. Yonder is a rooster wet down 
to a peak. His scimetar tail is only a single dagger 
of a feather. He looks sorry. The crow is washed 
out of him. 

You keep wiping the window-panes on the mside 

144 



AQUARIUS THE WATER-BEARER. 145 

because tliey are filmed with water on the outside. 
You know better, and so does the man who feels in 
Ills pockets for something that is not in them. Right 
vest pocket, left vest pocket, right breast pocket, left 
breast pocket, right hind pocket, left hind pocket, 
right pantaloons pocket, left pantaloons pocket. He 
will stand there and make the rounds once, twice, 
thrice, and then whip off his hat and find it there ! 
He is not logical. None of us are. 

Eaves are busy, water-spouts jolly, and gutters con- 
gested. There is a splashing in little puddles, a 
drumming on tin pans, a tinkling in cisterns, and a 
tattoo upon roofs. It is a mass-meeting of rains, — 
perpendicular, oblique, horizontal, and no rainbow in 
a fortnight ! Engines hardly have to stop to take 
water ! 

You look down from your window on two currents 
of umbrellas. Forget there is anybody under them, 
and it is as queer as a dream born of a "Welsh rarebit 
at midnight. It resembles a stream of mildewed, ani- 
mated and locomotive toadstools from Brobdignag. 
They drift against each other, then part and fioat 
away. There are sleek silken ones that shine as if it 
i-ained copal. There are great blue ones with a bor- 
der, and big enough for dog-tents, that move in a 
lumbering way. Old folks underneath. They say 
" wvabriliy There are faded ones, the color of a Con- 
federate soldier's jacket. There are wrecks of fellows 
with their slender bones thrust through the dingy 
surface, — bad cases of compound fracture. There's a 



146 SUMMER-SAVORY. 

pciTasol scudding along amid tlie tumefied dinginess, 
like a bright little flower afloat on a very turgid cur- 
rent. It dodges in and out among the troughs of the 
sea. Every overgrown umbrella is a threatening bil- 
low. Poor little fair-weather flower, and dreadfully 
wilted and pelted by the rain. Its owner was caught 
out. You see a white flicker of skirts as she scuds. 

"ARIES THE EAM." 

There goes an umbrella drawn down over the own- 
er's eyes. He lowers his brow and forges ahead with- 
out minding who is coming. He is as bad to meet 
as a Texas steer, with his unicorn of an umbrella. 
Umbrella or no umbrella, he butts his way through 
the world. Clear the track when you see him, unless 
you are carrying a ladder. If so, just swing it around 
endwise and make for him ! He is always in the sign 
Aries. Everybody knows him. When he argues he 
only butts, and when he butts he shuts his eyes. In- 
telligent adversary ! He is a heavy-weight wherever 
he is. He might do for ballast, if only he would keep 
still. 

"Aries " does not like flowers. He calls them " po- 
sies." A moss-rose bud would be about as much at 
home in his button-hole as it would in an elephant's 
ear. He has no taste, except it be a beefsteak taste. 
His flower is a sunflow^er. He is coarse, hard, hearty, 
and he succeeds. What is success? Not that I do 
not respect sunflowers, — those big rosettes with their 
curious mosaic and Nicholson-pavement of seeds. I 



AQUAEIUS THE WATER-BEAREK. 147 

think of them in the same thought with the just-ready- 
to-wilt poppy, and the china-asters and the sweet- 
williams and the hollyhocks, — the dear old tribes 
of our grandmothers' day. 

"GEMINI THE TWINS." 

How many young fellows there are in the street, 
armed with umbrellas every one, and looking for 
somebody. Watch the girls dart out of store-doors, 
and make for cover like startled hares. There the}'' 
go, arm in arm, like two-thirds of the triple link badge 
of Odd-Fellowship: "friendship, love and truth," the 
umbrella lowered modestly . down so that their two 
heads are in the garret of it, and drifting very slowly 
indeed. It is a pleasant day beneath it. Had they 
been in the ark, — they two, — they would not have 
thought it rained. Umbrellas have determined desti- 
nies. 

It rains, and the sea of umbrellas is yet ebbing and 
flowing. There goes a high stepper. You know it 
by the way the umbrella bobs up and down, like the 
cork of a line with something nibbling at the hook. 
Yonder is a man w^ho walks with his elbows when he 
is in a hurry, for he lifts them whenever he " crooks 
the pregnant hinges of the knee," just as a horse 
works his ears every time he swallows. Here comes 
a glider. The umbi'ella floats evenly along. There a 
man carries his umbrella at half-cock. It hangs down 
his back like a peddler's pack. He hails you. He 
hails everybody. He flings scraps of talk this side 



148 SUMMER-SAVORY. 

and that as he goes. He is a pleasant friend, if you 
don't mind that love-token of a slap in the back he 
is always giving. 



'AND JULIET IS THE SUN 



t" 



The clouds "hold up." The sun throws oif his 
wet blankets, and touches up the glittering signs, and 
the glossy water-proofs tliat are executed at store- 
doors, and the open umbrellas swung up by the peak, 
to give you a damp whisk and challenge a buyer. 
The little Othellos of bootblacks, their " occupation 
gone," that have been casting disconsolate looks all 
day at the splashed leather as it spattered by, brighten 
up a little, reflecting in their faces some faint fore- 
glimmer of a " shine." The wet arrow on the neigh- 
boring church gives a flash as if somebody brandished 
it. The crowd fold their tents like the Arabs. The 
umbrella sea subsides, and the people come to the sur- 
face. But the character of the picture is not gone, 
only changed. One holds out his closed umbrella 
by the tip of the handle, much as you swing up a 
rabbit by the ears. Another grasps it around the 
waist, and carries it at trail arms. A third reverses 
it, as if he were a soldier at a funeral. Another 
never stops to button the umbrella, but makes a cane 
of it, the cambric corners untidily flapping as he goes. 
But the most miserable of men comes yonder. He 
has chucked his umbrella under his arm, with the 
ferrule thrust out behind, like a bowsprit at the wrong 
end of the craft, and trained at precisely the right 



AQUAKIUS THE WATER-BEARER. 149 

angle to put out an ej^e for the next man behind 
him, who has no idea that he is charging on a pike. He 
is a two-footed hornet. Can you think of anything 
more uncomfortable than an umbrella in your eye? 
Many a man has had a beam in it without knowing 
it, but an umbrella, never ! That human hornet is a 
selfish man. His umbrella points out his character 
like a finger-post. His maxim is vulgar and profane. 
It is " the devil take the hindmost." 

A rainy day is a good day to see in, — better tlian 
when the sun shines. As to-day grows duller and 
dimmer, yesterday grows brighter and nearer. We can 
look a long way into the past when it rains. We re- 
member. It is pleasant. It is sad. It is like the music 
of Ossian. It is both. 



OHAPTEE XIX. 



HILL COUSINS. 



HUNTING health and hunting happiness are 
alike, you seldom find them where you seek 
them. They come to you by. the way at unexpected 
times and places. The devil is credited with a great 
deal of mischief that the stomach is guilty of. Many 
a glooni}^ doctrine is born, not of theology, but of cold 
dumplings and toasted cheese at bedtime. The writer 
has been looking for strength among the hills where 
the roads are set upon one end and paved, you would 
think, by old torrents. He rambled without much. of 
any purpose, — a sort of gypsying, — and he found 
cousins. 

There are three kinds of cousins in America. In 
Scotland there are forty. They are reckoned by num- 
bers, — first, second and third. In cousins I am spe- 
cially gifted, for 1 have sixty, and the most of them 
are sprinkled among the hills of New York, in the 
counties of Oneida, Lewis, Herkimer and Otsego. 
Take them as a race, the average distance between 
the cradle and the grave is about four miles. They 
have read the proverb of " the rolling stone," and 
most of them have gathered moss. Children gener- 
ally set great store by uncles and aunts, always except- 

150 



HILL COUSINS. 151 

ing " the Babes in the Woods," whom Robin Red- 
breast '' did cover them with leaves." When these 
are gone, and the year wanes into antunin, consins 
are in their prime. They last till snow comes, and 
sometimes into the dead of winter. Hence cousins 
are a desirable kind of relative to have. As pomolo- 
gists say, they are " good keepers." 

As you get older, consins rise in value, because 
they grow scarce, but you must not let very long 
intervals elapse between meetings. That is, you must 
not wait over twenty years. I waited thirty. The 
changes are suggestive. Should you meet a cousin you 
had not set eyes upon since " cats wore fillets," which 
means " ever so long," do not straighten up into an 
exclamation-point and cry out over the ravages of 
time. Just consider that you are only contemplating 
yourself in a looking-glass made of a cousinly face, and 
you will grow quiet as an oyster. When people fall 
to telling one another, after a score of years of absence, 
that neither has changed, that they should know each 
other anywhere, swpar them and see! Twenty to one 
they are both lying in a sort of harmless, feeble way, 
in an attempt to make themselves believe that the 
Old Haymaker has fallen asleep in a fence-corner, 
with his scythe hanging upon an apple-tree over his 
head. 

Remember a girl-cousin of sixteen, round as a ring 
and fair as the moon, with glittering teeth and voice 
cheery as a morning song, and hair that tumbles down 
her shoulders like a capillary cataract. Leave her to 



152 SUMMER-SAVORY. 

time for a couple of dog^s-ages, and then meet her 
somewhere, and if Adam's-apple does not take a start 
for a late growth in that throat of jonrs, then yon 
mnst have bolted the troublesome fruit in your child- 
hood. You scan the face for traces of the girl that 
was ; you pick up a few scattered features here and 
there, and try to reconstruct them into some sem- 
blance of the old-time cousin, but it is a failure. And 
all the while you are doing this, Jane is busy taking 
you to pieces and building you over, and there is a 
twin failure. Then she nerves herself up to men- 
tion her grandchildren, and you recall a joke dead 
forty years ago, and so you make the best of it and 
laugh, "as it were," across the graves of a genera- 
tion, and bid each other good-by, and this dice-box 
of a world gives another shake, and you meet no 
more. 

When first-cousins give out, there is a stock of the 
"second" sort ready to your hand. In fact, kind 
nature seems to make jDrovision for a fresh crop of 
cousins as the years go on. As a rule, they "hold 
out" better than nearer relatives, and "stick to" 
faster and longer. A brother is a good thing. Like- 
wise a sister. But we get to kno^v each other un- 
comfortably well, and live so long in the same house 
and wrangle over the same doughnut, that unless 
we are of the good children that die young, there 
is not much chance for anybody's quoting and saying, 
" Behold how these brethren love one another." The 
probabilities of fraternal affection increase, I think, 



HILL COUSINS. 153 

with the number of -brothers and sisters; that is, the 
relations among the many are less intimate than they 
are among the few. Nobody can endure the steady 
stare of a microscope without suffering, if he can with- 
out flinching. " The fewer we are the more let us 
love one another," is a kind of sentimental twaddle. 
Remember Cain and Abel ! Consider the Siamese 
twins ! As a rule, Damon and Pythias are not broth- 
ers. We used to read in the first book of Latin a 
conversation between a lion and a certain insignificant 
animal, wherein the little one taunted the big one 
with having a small family. The reply was a cross 
of cheap magnificence, partly leonine, and the rest 
Roman : " One, but a lion ! " 

LIVING IN MICROSCOPES. 

Writing of magnifiers: a man might as well live 
in a microscope, with an eye at it that never winks, 
as to be a clergyman. The public turns itself into 
a policeman in plain clothes to " shadow " the minister. 
His patience is tested, his temper is tried, his indigna- 
tion aroused, and he has incessant temptations to talk 
tomahawk and forget to be a gentleman. The virtue 
of the Toledo blade was not in its keenness, but its 
temper; that, though you bent the point to the hilt, 
it never flew to pieces. There is no such thing as a 
fragment, a vulgar fraction of a gentleman. He is 
gentleman ad unguem — to the claw — or not at all. 
The tempel" of the blade is the spirit of the^ man, 
and how refined it must be in celestial fire to main- 



154 SUMMER-SAVORY. 

tain its integrity ! It seems to me peculiarly true of 
clergymen that tliey have nothing earthly to fear but 
their friends. They are in more danger from them 
than from their enemies or the devil. 

There are merciful laws for the preservation of 
game. There are times and seasons when it is wicked 
to slay it. Clergymen enjoy no such legislation. 
They appear to be game all the year round. We are 
quite worn out with hearing of ecclesiastical falls and 
clerical wolves in woolen clothes. Let the lawyers 
have a chance, for there are more bones of Little Red 
Riding Hoods in the courts of the law than there 
are in the courts of the Lord. Let a physician take 
a tumble, now and then. Let some merchant be a 
cataract. Let us not have all the Niagaras rolling 
down the pulpit stairs. Those people who waste 
their time in " stalking " ministers are generally 
poachers themselves. 

Back to the cousins : there are few lions among 
them, and not a mouthful of Latin. Such quail-like 
broods of cousins in the same nest ! Eight, eleven, 
thirteen, and they kick the beam all the way from 
one hundred and forty to two hundred and thirty, 
and as a rule, they pull together. Have you heard 
of any battle in the Empire State ? When two fall 
out it is a quarrel, but when many come to blows it 
is a war. 

When the Waldenses were made to sing, " For 
the strength of the hills we bless Thee," it was a 
true song in more senses than one. They furnished 



HILL COUSINS. 155 

the Christians with caves and rugged fastnesses as 
shelter from the persecuting Sauls. They furnish you 
with a more vigorous play of muscle and a freer res- 
piration. Wherever you are in Otsego the horizon 
is scolloped with hills. They roll grandly, carrying 
huge bowlders up to the sky-line as if they were 
bubbles, and tossing the hemlocks and pines, the 
beeches and maples, as if they were lily leaves on 
stormy water. Otsego county has pleasant memories 
to tens of thousands. To " H. and E. Phinney, Coo- 
perstown," the child-world has been indebted for small 
parcels of happiness, — those blessed little primers, 
filled with pictures of birds and beasts and good boys 
and angelic girls. Think of happiness, ■" price one 
cent ! " The writer has a little menagerie, to-day, in 
a blue paper cover, bearing the imprint of the Coo- 
perstown firm, that was purchased with a Spanish 
sixpence that had been bitten to test it, and lost in 
the street and trodden on, and carried in a buckskin 
purse and a red morocco pocket-book, and knotted 
up in a bandana handkerchief, and paid out for candy 
and blackberries and jewsharps ; but it never bought 
quite so much perfect delight as when it was ex- 
changed for H. and E. Phinney's " Book of Beasts 
and Birds," and it remains to-day a precious souvenir 
of a ruder, simpler time. 

Many of the descendants of them that ticked their 
way into the county with an axe — the woodman's 
clock — yet remain among the pleasant hills, and the 
blood of the old stock yet courses in the veins of 



156 SUMMER- SAVORY. 

many stalwart men and pleasant women. After dark, 
one night, a wagon-load of cousins climbed rocky 
hills, and drove through a ravine black as a -wolf's 
mouth, and wound up to the summit of the hill, 
where, in a spacious home, dwell a pair that pull 
down the steelyards at about four hundred pounds ; 
the house lively with three generations, and there 
might easily be four "without working a miracle. A 
hearty welcome and — feather-beds, fat as if they had 
been direct importations from Amsterdam or Rot- 
terdam or Potsdam, or some other profane region, 
awaited us. A great wavy farm lay around us, eighty 
acres of meadow, and regiments of corn, and a sea of 
pasture. The milk of two hundred cows is struck 
off into cheese, and dated like medallions. The curd 
squeaks in your teeth as it did forty years ago, when 
they made cheeses about as big as a dinner-plate. 
Spring water comes down from the hills of its own 
accord, and runs into the house, the barn, everj^ where. 
The breakfast-table is broad and long and laden. You 
think the prayer for " our daily bread " means far 
more than you ever dreamed it did, when you see 
how the sections disappear by the loaf The hills 
are a hungry place. They talk at breakfast of the 
owls they heard last night, of the hundred turkeys 
killed by foxes on the farm this summer. It is a 
new world. Breakfast over, the family scatter like a 
bell-mouthed musket. A boy is driving away a flock 
of geese. A dog is taking the cows to pasture. The 
mower begins to tick like a gigantic locust in the 



HILL COUSINS. 157 

hill-meadow. The girls are busy with the great white 
sea in the cheese factory. 

There is a spot, just over the ridge, you hasten to 
see. It is " a city set on a hill, that cannot be hid " — 
the silent acres where " the rude forefathers of the 
hamlet sleep." Near it stands the " Taylor Hill 
Meeting-House," with a rusty "1822" served up on 
a wooden platter in the gable, — a house without 
spire or belfry, and unchanged since the day of ded- 
ication, when preachers rejoiced and thanked God, 
who joined the church triumphant many a long year 
ago, and men and women sang Old Hundred and 
Coronation who have learned the New Song. The 
church has neither pastor nor people. The front 
door is locked with a stick of stove-wood. You 
open it and enter the simple sanctuary. On that 
raised seat along the wall sat the singers — the leader 
a gray-haired deacon who pitched the tune for forty 
years. Girls, wives, grandmothers, dead. And there 
is the pulpit, like the half of an old-fashioned wine- 
glass fastened against tlie wall. Two little flights of 
stairs, straight as " the narrow way," lead up to it. 
If Elder Bennett ever stood in it, he must have 
looked like an oak with its foot in a door-yard vase. 
You enter the little Zion's look-out. On the narrow 
ledge, guiltless of trimming as a wooden bread-tray, 
lies the Bible. Like the church, it bears the date of 
1822. The bare board seat is as it was in the days 
of the fathers. 



158 SUMMEll-SAVOKY. 

THE OLD ELDEK. 

Yon remember in childliood seeing the little old 
preacher, Elder Stephen Taylor, who said goin' and 
comin' and praisin' — but what matters a worthless 
"g" or so? — stand in that pulpit and preach. It 
was a sermon, as you recall it now, full of good 
sense and pure doctrine, and quaint, apt illustration, 
and decided power. You remember how earnest he 
became, and how his bald head grew red like "the 
old man eloquent's " in Congress, as he made for 
some blundering "gentleman from" somewhere, and 
pelted him with facts and dates, and chapter and 
verse, as if they were so many cobble-stones. One 
of his illustrations you will never forget. He was 
talking of living "above the world," and he said: 
" Haven't you seen, my brethren, an eagle when at- 
tacked by a flock of little birds, any one of which 
he could have killed with a stroke of his talon or a 
blow of his beak? But they are too many for him. 
They dart up beneath him and vex him. They pounce 
upon hi in from above. They scream around his head 
and bewilder him. He sits upon the tall hemlock 
as long as he can, and then spreads his great wings. 
Does he fly down and hide in the bush? Does )ie 
waste his strength in attempting to fight an enemy 
that he cannot number? Oh, no, dear friends, he 
gives a sweep or two, and up he goes above the hills 
and the trees. The flock of little birds struggle up 
after him, but higher and higher he rises into clearer, 
thinner air ; he leaves his busy enemies one after 



HILL COUSINS. 159 

another. Tiiey weary of win^^-, and sink panting back 
to their native woods again. He is alone in the sky; 
he is too high to cast a shadow. That eagle, brethren 
and sisters, is the human soul, and those little birds 
are the sins and temptations that vex us. Never 
tarry to iight them. Never think to destroy them, 
but just put forth the strength that God gives you 
to rise above them all, and so you shall be nearer to. 
heaven and God. This is bein', as the poet says, 
' while in, above the world ! ' " 

The years that are gone throng in at the open 
door. You descend from the pulpit, and take a part- 
ing look at the old church. On that cross-beam is 
the w^reck of a bird's nest. Not so widely scattered 
is the brood she hovered over as they who once 
gathered within these walls. You pass thoughtfully 
out into the sunshine, and stand in the shade of the 
old church. What is this that grows so rank, and 
rattles its ripened sprigs in the morning wind ? The 
air is sweet with its aromatic breath. It is caraway ! 
In the days that are gone the congregation brought 
their luncheon in summer-time, and sat in the shadow 
of the wall between sermons and talked and ate. The 
mothers and the girls brought their inevitable clus- 
ters of ' caraway, and seeds were scattered here, and 
have sprung up self-sown year after year, " even until 
this day." What a sermon upon human life is this ! 
The caraway remains, but the fingers that strewed it 
are nerveless with age, or have forgotten their cun- 
ning altogether. 



160 SUMMER-SAVORY. 

They propose to repair and modernize the old meet- 
ing-house, but let them not lay desecrating hands upon 
the pulpit. It is as quaint as one of old Herrick's 
poems. Let them carpet and cushion and stain and 
grain pew and aisle as they will ; but farther than 
renewing the simple coat of white, let them not touch 
that queer little watchman's box for the sentry of the 
Lord. 

A HEALTH AT BRIDGEWATEE. 

We have been riding to-day on the heavy swells 
of Herkimer and Otsego. The streams through all 
the region have an errand and a voice as they run 
along their rough McAdams. Every one of them 
is as busy as a haymaker. You cross the Unadilla 

— as pretty a name for a girl as it is for a river — 
fringed with willows that are forever looking at them- 
selves in the glancing water, as if some gigantic naiad 
had stitched the bank with double willows and left 
the foliage waving free in the water and the air. 
" The daughters of Judali " could not have hung their 
harps in a prettier place. You go through the old 
village of Bridgewater, that has grown like a candle 

— less as it grows older; busier, if not bigger, forty 
years ago than it is to-day. Bridgewater has a mem- 
ory. 

Many a year ago one of the dead presidents of 
Madison University was a student at Hamilton Col- 
lege. He had just been graduated. He had taken 
the valedictory. He was on his way to his hill-top 
home in Edmeston, and he halted at Bridgewater for 



HILL COUSINS. 161 

dinner. There were with him the girl he was going 
to marry, her brother, and a young sister of his own. 
I must lay that clod of a word upon them all to- 
day. 1 must say they are dead. At that dinner 
the young student, as was the fashion sixty years 
ago, called for a bottle of wine, and tilled the glasses, 
and stood up and drank to the days to come. That 
was fifty-six years ago, and all the future they were 
thinking of as they drank has slipped silently and 
solemnly into the past. A son of the student and 
the girl halted a moment to-day in front of the old 
tavern where they met, and this world looked very 
narrow and very perishable indeed — just an isthmus 
covered with grass and roughened with many graves. 
17* 



OHAPTEE XX. 

JAW. 

SAMSO]^ was the most eloquent man of ancient 
times. He overwhelmed his Philistine andience 
with jaw, albeit it was the jaw of an ass. Why not? 
Balaam's beast saw what his master could not discern. 
He had an angelic vision, and spoke right out. Jaws 
go in pairs, as IN^oah's menagerie went into the ark, 
but it is only the under-jaw that has a character in 
all creatures but the shark. As for him, that com- 
pound adjustment of levers bringing the two rows of 
cutlery together and setting them wide like the blades 
of a pair of shears, gives his countenance an open 
expression that is winning if not amiable. 

I once visited a rolling-mill where iron runs about 
like quicksilver, and railroad bars, — a lift for four 
knottj^-armed men, — glide between the rollers, and 
thin out as they glide, as smoothly as satin ribbons 
run over a shop-girl's forefinger. I happened there 
when a row of boarders, chuckle-headed like young 
robins, were eating a lunch of cold iron, and snipping 
off the ponderous bars that were fed to them as easily 
and noiselessly as a rabbit nips a clover blossom. It 
was an exhibition of jaw that Samson would have en- 
joyed. 

162 



JAW. 163 

When a man's head slopes up to the ridge of self- 
esteem, and then tumbles abruptly down behind, j^ou 
know he is a man given to reflection, — in a look- 
ing-glass; that he has the grace of charity, — for him- 
self; and you envy him a little. But you do not quite 
know a man until you have measured his lower jaw. 
When it retreats meekly away, as if it had some no- 
tion of slipping down through his cravat into his 
bosom, you expect to hear him apologizing for his 
existence. He came into the world with a snaffle-bit 
in his mouth that holds him back by the jaw, and 
never slips out. What can we do for a horse that 
neither ^nlh by the bit nor draws by the traces? 

But when that jaw juts squarely and boldly out 
like a promontory, and closes upon its neighbor like 
a vise, as much as to say, " Bring on your walnuts if 
they want cracking," he has what is called grip in a 
bulldog, and tenacity in a general. The only way to 
coax him is to kill him. You have seen a man with 
such an osseous formation. It took a small lime-kiln 
to make it. Like the antlers of an elk, it is the most 
wonderful part of him. Moreover, his superciliary 
arches are very much arched indeed, and he has a way 
of lifting the fringe of eyebrow at times that provokes 
the suspicion that he can slip his scalp off" back over 
his head like a nightcap, if he tries. Then exactly 
over the eyes, that look as if they were not fast colors, 
and had been washed in two waters, and exactly over 
the arches that are nearly sharp enough to be Gothic, 
and halfway up the slope, rest his spectacles, like a 



164 SUMMER-SAVORY. 

couple of dormer-windows. It is a sort of two-story 
face, with two rows of windows in it. Then his long 
hair flows away behind his ears, and rolls down the 
nape of his neck and ripples over his coat-collar in a 
kind of John-in-the-wilderness way. This is the sort 
of front he presents when anybody opposes him. His 
voice has a twang to it, and twangs prolonged make 
whines. It has a quaver likewise. He has inherited 
Samson's own weapon, and with it he sets the doc- 
trine of "ruling majorities" at defiance. He resem- 
bles the son of Manoah in two ways : he treats oppos- 
ing brethren as if they were so many Philistines, and 
when they are too much for him he bows himself 
upon the pillars, if so be lie may bring down the 
temple in which he cannot reign. 

But the most aggravating thing is yet to be told. 
Having applied the purchase of that jaw to a question, 
and held on as vicious as a vise to his own opinion, 
and worried people until they give in from sheer ex- 
haustion, this man will rise up and bring his two 
hands together at the finger-tips like a V, and raise 
his voice and his eyebrows, and extol the beauty of 
harmony, and say, " Behold, how good and how pleas- 
ant a thing it is for brethren to dwell together in 
unity," when he never agreed with anybody in all 
his life ! Poor Philistines ! Jawed to death, and then 
congratulated upon the disaster. 

This man is no fiction, neither is he a stranger. 
He is in church and state and social life. If on a 
jury, praj^ers for the hapless eleven are in order. If 



JAW. 165 

leading an army, he pays the highest price demanded 
for a victory, and never counts the cost. Yon can 
pick liim out as you could Samson in the temple, for 
he is the man with the jawbone. There is nothing 
like an appropriate text when such men let go their 
hold : " With the jawbone of an ass, lieaps upon heaps, 
with the jawbone of an ass have 1 slain a thousand 
men." 



CHAPTEE XXI. 

JUST AND GENEROUS. 

THE OLD GUARD. 

THERE he paces, to and fro, his red signal of dan- 
ger furled under his arm. He encounters water 
in every form. Rain, snow, sleet, hail, fog and steam. 
He is blown upon bj thirty-two winds. Fire tries 
him summers, and frost takes him in hand winters — 
and in foot, too, for that matter — but he never flinches. 
How many men, women and children he has saved 
from mutilation and death ; how many horses from 
the hands of the knacker, and how many vehicles from 
the fate of kindling-wood, nobod}^ knows ; but then I 
should like his roll of achievements better than the 
soldier's who had killed four times as many. He has 
seen millions of people go by, and cattle from a thou- 
sand hills, and there he stands as faithful as a light- 
house. But he cannot last forever. Some day he 
must surrender the little red flag. He has been the 
company's servant about as long as Jacob served to 
get Rachel. The law of his life is duty. He knows 
engines by their talk, and freight by its number. He 
never stole a rod. of railroad, or pocketed a switch. 
But will the great corporation ever put him upon 
the retired list, and pension him? And yet some 

166 



JUST AKD GENEEOUS. 167 

people seem to think well of faithfulness, and several 
eulogies in prose and verse have been pronounced 
upon honesty by men who would " bear watching " 
themselves. 

STEALING. 

Honesty is a respectable virtue, but it is prodigious- 
ly homely. If a man practices it but little, he praises 
it a great deal, and so does his duty by it as a sort 
of poor relation. Agur was afraid to be poor, and 
he did not dare to be rich. He feared he should 
swear in the one case and steal in the other. He 
M-as a timid man, was Agur. People have grown 
braver since his time. There are several courageous 
men in Washington. Now and then there is a lion 
among them, and that's what he does. Lie on and 
steal on go in couples. It is a horrible pun, but it 
is good enougli for the su*bject. If Agur had been 
an Indian, and his prayer had been answered, some 
of tliem would have made off with the answer and 
left him to pray again. They would have made a 
sort of trap of him, to catch answers for them to 
steal ! Stealing is never respectable unless it is atro- 
cious. When the depredation is so large that twenty 
per cent of it will establish his innocence, the man 
is a success. Nearly everybody steals something, even 
if it is only a march or a glance. What a choir it 
would be, if all who could sing it with the spirit, 
should join in on the first half line of that familiar 
hymn, and stop definitely where it is dangei'ous to 

halt a second: 

"I love to steal! " 



168 SUMMEK-SAVORY. 

FAIRS. 

The average fair for the sale of worthless articles 
for noble causes is a place where you are robbed by 
your own consent, and smiled on by the banditti. 
You pay a dollar for a pen-wiper, not because a young 
Kickapoo lacks a blanket, or the pulpit a cushion, 
but because the lady who halts you in the highway 
of Yanity Fair has invested a dime in it, and chal- 
lenges you to make it a dollar, or . Well, you 

" stand and deliver." Somebody gives ten cents in 
the disguise of a woolen heart, to be pounced upon 
by steel pens, as that old Greek's was by vultures, 
and asks you to give ninety. This is the unpopular 
side of the question, but I submit that I have not 
left the subject. Why should a fair do for a good 
sake what an honorable merchant could not do for 
any sake? Is it fair? 

I met a suitable motive for a small fair last Sun- 
day. It was a boy that looked as if his clothes had 
been torn to pieces by tigers in the interest of tailors 
out of business. They were so thoroughly ventilated* 
that their natural home was the rag-bag, and yet he 
contrived to keep them flapping about him as a sleight- 
of-hand fellow keeps a half dozen balls going up and 
coming down and never touching ground. He was 
barefooted, and his hair grew out of the chinks in 
his hat. That was his best suit, except the tights 
he was born in. Whenever a well-dressed lad came 
within contrasting distance, his tattered decency went 
into a more dismal eclipse than ever. Now, he wants 



JUST AND GENEROUS. 169 

a fair, and there are more of liira, and girls to match. 
Suppose Dorcas should make garments and have a 
fair, and smile people into buying at honest prices, 
and then give tatterdemalion the Sunday suit and 
the new frock, and be rewarded by tatterdemalion's 
wonder and delight, and have the profits besides, for 
the aisle carpet, the pulpit cushion, or " India's coral 
strand." And then you have given the boy a moral 
jog, as well as a braided jacket, for anybody is apt 
to behave better in good clotlies. There is many a 
man who cannot conduct himself like a christian sim- 
ply because he is dressed like a beggar. 

THE ART OF GIVING. 

The Golden Rule is a section of " the higher law." 
It requires more than a spirit of obedience to obey it. 
" Do unto others as ye would they should do unto 
you." That is all of it — easily read, but not easily 
done. It implies the possession of some imagination, 
but there are men who are not proprietors of a par- 
ticle. To step out of yourself and be somebody else, 
think the whole matter over, and then step quietly 
back again — all this is involved in it. But did you 
ever hear a man thank the Lord for his imagination, 
or pray for a little more? lie sometimes names the 
dinner he is about to eat, but he gives imagination the 
go-by. He has no idea that he needs any, and asso- 
ciates it with short lines that trot, amble or gallop, 
as the gait happens to be — short lines, with a capi- 
tal letter at one end, and a capital jingle at the other, 



170 SUMMER-SAVOKT. 

tricked out, as it were, with " bells on their toes." 
It is a costly rule, and therefore golden. It costs a 
thoughtful self-sacrifice, for which nobody will com- 
mend you. I*^ow a just or a generous act committed 
in a moment of enthusiasm, when a man shies a plump 
pocket-book at an object, in a sort of Fourth-of-July 
fervor, is a very different thing from that same act 
performed after deliberate premeditation. It means 
more, for it is significant of the man. The one is a 
principle, the other an impulse. Generosity is a con- 
tagious disease, and is always most violent in great 
crowds. Men have thus won, in the heat of the mo- 
ment, the reputation of being munificent, who directly 
set about cheating somebody to supply* tlie deficiency. 

THE USES OF IMAGINATION. 

Most men lack imagination. You never saw a 
person yet who did not volunteer the information, 
that should he come into a liberal fortune, of which 
there was no probability, he would give you at least 
ten per cent, out of hand, — ten thousand on a hun- 
dred thousand, and if a million, then the cool hundred ! 
And you try to believe he would do it, and you call 
him a generous fellow, and he returns the compliment 
when, in like manner, you bestow a few thousands 
upon him. But such men have no imagination. They 
cannot put themselves in the rich man's place, or if at 
all, so badly damaged in the transportation that they 
do not know themselves when they get there. Be- 
nevolence is an easy virtue, but beneficence is quite 
another thing. 



JUST AND GENEROUS. 171 

Giving " blesses him that gives and him that takes " 
is Shakespeare, but not absohite truth. If the gift 
costs the giver a temporary privation or an extra ef- 
fort ; if he accorrvpanies the gift and sees it actually 
appropriated, and the comfort and gratitude and hap- 
piness it brings ; or if he has imagination enough to 
follow it to its destination, and see with his eyes sliut 
all he would see if actually present, then indeed the 
act " blesses him that gives and him that takes." Tlie 
art of giving is one of the fine arts, and not well un- 
derstood. You have met the lady who embroiders 
beautiful tidies for the poor, when they all sit upon 
stools, and elegant little cloaks for children who have 
nothing to wear when they get them. It resembles 
the thoughtful kindness of her who sends a tailor's 
goose for their Christmas dinner, or skates and a buf- 
falo-robe to a Polynesian. 

It is a standing wonder that murderers on execu- 
tion eve sleep soundly, and that, in most instances, 
they go to their death with unfaltering and sometimes 
unassisted steps. They are like Pope's lamb in one 
thing : 

" The lamb thy riot dooms to bleed to-day, 
Had he thy reason, would he skip and play! " 

It is a lack of sense in the lamb, and of imagination 
in the criminal. He never mentally rehearses the 
catastrophe or the crime, and thinks deliberately 
through the terrible details. If he did, and when he 
does, his strength always departs from him. Eugene 
Aram was a man of imagination. He committed the 



172 SUMMER-SAVORY. 

murder over and over, and death to him was a com- 
fort. 

The woman that always sees things with her eyes 
shut will take a table laden with flowers, and see the 
room decorated with them without touching a bud ; 
and then, before you know it, make the apartment a 
beautiful picture. So with furniture and adornings. 
Tumble the whole into the middle of the floor, and 
she will see them all out of chaos into a fitness of po- 
sition that could not be improved Mnth a month's 
thinking, and not lay a hand on them at all. It is 
not taste alone that inspires her. It is imagination 
also. 

There are other women who keep things revolving 
like the bits of broken glass in a kaleidoscope. Beds, 
bureaus, chairs and mirrors go round and round 
like the broom in the riddle, though they do not 
" pop behind the door," but it would not matter if 
they did. They are the women that put china cats 
on the mantlepiece face to face, and lay the show-books 
like spokes of wheels on the center-table, and back 
eveiy chair up squarely against the wall, and put one 
ostrich feather over the looking-glass so, /, and an- 
other ostrich feather over the looking-glass so, \, that 
the combined eff'ect may be thus, X, and so balance 
everything that the room resembles a donkey between 
two panniers, or a country doctor's saddle-bags, or any 
other thing that is distressingly symmetrical. These 
are the people who want everything to " corajpare^'' 
whatever that may mean. 



CHAPTER XXII. 



STITCHING LANDSCAPES. 



DISTANCE, with nothing swift to conquer it, 
renders the impressive grouping of geograph- 
ical facts ahiiost impossible. The world lies about 
in loose leaves. We pick up one here and there, but 
it is only when the locomotive whips through the 
miles like a cambric needle along a hem, and stitches 
those leaves together in a book we can have at once 
under our eyes, that such facts grow eloquent. Take, 
some spring day, at Chicago, an express needle on 
the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern, which is the 
locomotive. You cling to the thread, which is the 
train, and within twenty hours you may see men 
plowing the fields for corn, planting corn, hoeing corn, 
tlie three eras in the M'ork grouped upon one illus- 
trated page. You can see lilacs in leaf, lilacs in 
bud, lilacs in blow, as you cross line after line of 
longitude as a boy ticks with a stick along the slats 
of a picket fence. You feel as if you were reading 
a chapter of prophecy backward. 

Those September days, broad, bright and round 
— the weather that "makes corn," as farmers say — 
I came east over the ITew York Central. It was 

173 



174 SUMMER-S.WOKY. 

hot and dusty along the track, but the world was 
not dustj^ and the green fields and woods looked 
cool. The most African and smothering thing I saw 
was a man riding upon the yellow road that danced 
up and down with the heat, in a " devil's-hornpipe " 
sort of way, perched on a load of fleeces; the sug- 
gestion of woolen clothes, oily wool and muttonish 
odor all simmering together, with a red-faced man 
in a narrow hat-brim, like a house without a cornice, 
frying in the middle of the mess, made thoughts as 
hot as a canal-boat kitclien in dog-days. Association 
mercifully helps you in such a case, and you think 
of ice tinkling in tumblers, and cool nooks in the 
woods, and feel refreshed. I glanced out of the win- 
dow after a look at that man mounted upon sheep's 
jackets, saw a girl under a willow by a brookside, 
with her white feet dangling in the running water 
and the shadows falling cool upon her, and I was 
comforted. 

The next minute a strong peppermint breeze blew 
into the window. The fields, ridged with rolls of 
green, showed the route of the mowers, and a pep- 
permint-still threw off its fragrant volumes that sweet- 
ened the air laden with coal smoke, and was far fresher 
than cologne. The oil, which is a staple of several 
sections of western New York — Lyons is one of them 
— is only gold in disguise, and meets a ready European 
sale. Mint farming seems to me pleasant, though less 
emotional than onion-raising, and kinder to the spinal 
column. 



STITCHING LANDSCAPES. 175 

Writing of Lyons : " the Lady of Lyons " came 
on board — she and two friends. Tliey may not be 
residents of that excellent town. They were of the 
species called chatterers. Taking seats in front and 
rear of an inoffensive and modest man, they fairly 
surrounded him, and began to talk loud and sharp 
as a driver's horn. They seemed to look directly 
at him as they faced about, but their talk shot by 
him, just missing now his right ear and now his 
left. Then the volley would be returned, and take 
him in the back. Then the third lioness, or what 
not, took diagonal aim and grazed his nose. It was 
a triangular voluble duel. The poor man was be- 
wildered. At first he thought they meant him, and 
he looked this way and that, as the words flew like 
shuttle-cocks, but he soon discovered that he had 
gotten into a rook's nest. And so they continned 
talking around him, over him, through him, making 
him of no more account than a gate-post. Chatterers 
are many. They are not liable to consumption, neither 
are the bellows of blacksmiths. They are not read- 
ers of Shakespeare. They do not know that a gentle 
voice is "an excellent thing in woman." Their an- 
swers are not of Job's sort that " turneth away wrath." 

NICKNAMES. 

When people make books and quote Shakespeare, 
let them not abridge the poacher's name, and end 
such a passage as " The quality of mercy is not 
strained " with ShaJc. Think of a pair of sentences 



176 SUMMEE-SAVORY. 

like this : " Now is the winter of onr discontent 
made glorious summer ! Shak ! " Why not quote 
the author of "The Task" as Cow^ or a line from 
Titsworth as Tit^ or the poet of Amesbury as Whit ? 
If the writer has left himself no room for anything 
but a nickname, let him leave it to the wits of his 
readers to ascertain whether " my name is Norval on 
the Grampian hills," or anywhere else. 

There is such a miserable monotony of names given 
to children, that when there is a spark of originality 
it is as pleasant as a ray of light in a dull place. One 
of the best I know of is a composite, manufactured 
for a daughter, by an old resident of Gilboa, Schoharie 
county, New York. It was a Shakespearean christen- 
ing. The father made all his naming preparations 
for a boy. Such things are not safe, however. The 
name he had ready for the stranger was Romeo. The 
proposed owner arrived. To be sure, it came within 
one of being a boy, but it was a girl ! The father 
was not to be balked, so he never went out of the 
play of Romeo and Juliet at all, but he took that 
classic couple and he blended a word, and he called 
the little blunder Romiette, and she bears the name 
" even until this day." 

We pass the Montezuma Marshes, and the harvest 
of rushes in tall, narrow-waisted bundles, and remem- 
ber the rush-bottomed chairs and the rush-lights of 
the old days,' and them that lighted the one and sat 
upon the other. They were the salt of the earth ; 
and almost before we were done thinking of them. 



STITCHIKG LANDSCAPES 177 

the wooden parallelograms of pans, with the salt show- 
ing white in the sun, were at right of ns and left of 
lis, as we passed the great Salt Licks of New York, 

Out of Syracuse, after taking a stitch under the 
canal through that eyelet-hole of a tunnel, we whipped 
fifty-four miles across country after one of those tem- 
perate engines that drink only twice or so in a hundred 
miles, to the modern Utica, that is not " pent-up " 
except as the president of the New York Central has 
fenced a piece of it. Then keeping company with the 
Mohawk, we fly by a million or two of Avild brooms, 
the clean and yellow plumage of the broom-corn 
sweeping the sun-bright air, that shall by-and-by be 
girded into besoms for kitchen floors and whisks for 
garments, and be soiled and worn out in less time 
than it took them to grow. Those acres of Mohawk 
levels bear all the poetry there is about " Buy a 
Broom ! " Then the flat Mohawk gets up a little at 
its old battle-place. Little Falls, where it had, some 
day, a desperate fight with rocks, that came finally 
off" the worse for wear. 

At Schenectacly the cars are reinforced by a crowd 
of human miscellany. Some Dutchmen, built like 
the churns of their foremothers, broad at the base 
and tapering out at the top ; some specimens of the 
tribe of Saratoga accompanying the trunks they had 
been living in ; some school-girls loaded with log- 
chains in ebony and gold, just to help the attraction 
of gravitation a little ; last and worst, the man and 
woman that open the window ahead of you, and let 



178 SUMMER-SAVORY. 

in upon you the storm of smoke, cinders and dust, 
wliile they escape the tempest and are comfortable. 
You shade your eyes with your hand. You cease to 
see the bright world going the other M-ay. You catch 
a cinder in your ear. You breathe smoke. You are 
a dirt-eater. At last an angel of a cinder gets into 
that woman's eye, and she weeps for the cinder if 
not for the sin. Down comes the window, and you 
betake yourself to breathing a few cubic feet of at- 
mospheric air, damaged, to be sure, but then no ash- 
man would pay as much for it as he might for the 
article you had just done with. 

The train stitches a few of the streets of Albany 
together,— Albany, where, according to the old chron- 
icler, the inhabitants once stood " with their gable- 
ends to the street," and we found the Hudson River 
train in harness awaiting us. The River trains always 
remind me of blooded horses, rather lean and not 
well groomed. Compared with their western kindred 
they are dusty and plebeian-looking things, but they 
can make time.. I like all brakemen, especially air- 
brakemen. They are live brakemen on the Hudson, 
but they fail in articulation. Their words are like 
the tails of the Manx cats — all brought to premature 
ends. One of them opened the car door before the 
wheels had done rumbling, and said, '■^Alas, poor ! " 
In a few minutes he opened it again, and flung 
through the crack, " Yor'iok ! " And what he said 
in the two spasms was straight from Hamlet, "Alas, 
poor Yorick ! " Consulting my guide, I found that 



STITCHIISTG LANDSCAPES. 179 

"Alas, poor" was brakemanese for Castleton, and that 
" Yorick " meant Schodack. He Lad a waj, too, when 
a name was too long, of catching it in the door and 
making an insect of it. Thns he gave " Livingston " 

a vicious pinch thus: Livistoni "Liviston!" It was 

a cheap way of getting at it, and saved breath, but 
then nobody but a scholar could tell what he meant. 
Hudson could not have left his name to a finer 
thing than that splendid river. There it lay glassy in 
the sun, cities and villages sitting npon the banks to 
watch it ; mountains in blue cloaks keeping everlast- 
ing ward ; steamers plying in their direct fashion to 
and fro; winged craft zigzagging up the river and 
feeling for wind with slanting canvas palms, or grasp- 
ing the breeze with a square hold as they swept down 
toward New York ; walls, battlements, towers, that no 
man builded. Talk of " sermons in stones." O Shakes- 
peare ! — but what are your lithoidal preachers to the 
shrieking dervishes of traffic they have made of cliif 
and rock all along the river? "Plantation Bitters — 
S. T. 1860 X!" "Pills!" "Powders!" "Eeady 
Relief ! " cry out at you in great letters on every side. 
They are worse than the Hebrew highwaymen of the 
old Bowery ; worse than Italian bandits. They make 
a terror of the landscape. But the worst and most 
impudent of all are those huge, bilious, yellow letters 
basking on the rocks like rattlesnakes in the sun, 
within sight of the cars, — " Gaegling Oil ! " Is it 
poison? Will it strangle the proprietor? Will twelve 



180 SUMMER-SAVORY. 

bottles kill him scientifically, and make a sardine of 
him? It is worth trying, and if successful, let the 
rocky faces of nature along the Hudson be washed 
clean of the oleaginous defilement. One of that man's 
grandfathers must have been a banker in the Temple 
when that writ of ejectment was served. " Gargling 
Oil," indeed ! 



CHAPTER XXIII. 

THE COUNTRY BALL-ROOM. 

WAS there a troop of strolling players? That 
ball-room was the scene of their histrionic 
achievements. Did old Braham, the sweet singer of 
English ballads, — who, as the frogs piped through the 
reigns of all the Pharaohs, sang through the reigns 
of several British lions, not to say lionesses, and then 
at seventy had a voice as flexible as a girl's, — did he 
give them an evening of Island melody till the night- 
ingales and the larks seemed singing at once ? That 
ball-room was the music-box for the minstrelsy. One 
day there came a hungry -looking man, — he ca'me from 
Hungar}^, — and brought a sort of harp Avitli him, out 
of whose strings he pulled tlie battle of Waterloo; 
guns and groans, battle-cheer and rallying cry, drums 
and bugles, wailing and sobbing, dirge and anthem, 
and then, last and best, the song of peace. I do not 
remember bis name, and could not spell it if I did, 
but he was a wonderful artist, and he stood at one end 
of the low-ceiled ball-room, and shut his eyes and 
touched those strings and bent a listening ear, as if 
he had never heard it before in his life, and we all 
sat in rows within range of the battle of Waterloo ! 

181 



182 SUMxMER-iSAVOKY. 

You should have seen that ball-room on a Fourth 
of July night, when it was trimmed with asparagus, 
fresh flowers, and a national flag, and lighted with 
lamps whose oil came " round the Horn " from the 
Pacific ; when the " grand marshal of the day," and 
general of militia likewise, led oif the dance, a double- 
handful of gold bullion shining upon his shoulders, 
and the fringed ends of his sash of crimson silk falling 
to his knee ; when men in blue coats with taper tails 
and gilded buttons, and dames in caps that flared like 
full-blown hollyhocks, moved through the graceful 
measure of the minuet with the coupee, the high step 
and the balance, amid an atmosphere of lavender, 
cologne and lamp-smoke ; when the air was dizzy with 
Virginia reels, and as full of "Money Musk" as a 
Russian lady's handkerchief, and everything was 
aswing with contra-dances and gay with quadrilles. 
Not a bearded face among the men, though there was 
but one barber in the village, and lie shaved notes and 
never left a whisker ! 

Writing of the general : the glitter and tinsel of 
war's livery is not altogether like Goldsmith's broken 
china, "kept for show," and it lessens the vanity of 
the thing a little when we think what the epaulet was 
really for, — not the modern badge with its modest 
hint of rank, that would not turn the thrust of a vi- 
cious musquito, but the old-fashioned yellow-ringleted 
shoulder-crest, a sort of mop without a handle, that 
could dull the downward stroke of sword or saber, 
and save an arm sometimes. So with the sash. Un- 



THE COUNTRY BALL-ROOM. 183 

wound from the waist of the wounded owner, the 
elastic web of silk lengthened and widened, and there 
you had the hammock wliereon the soldier could be 
borne away. 

Then you recall some other night when, in cutters 
by twos, in sleighs by clusters, the young men and 
maidens from the country round about, thronged in 
for a dance to the old ball-room, and what a medley 
it was of morocco shoes, " pumps," red, white and 
blue, cheeks, dresses and ribbons, palpitation, poma- 
tum, peppermint, and happiness, as bright as a bed of 
tulips. And w^eddings came of the dancings, and 
they paired off for the long promenade. And the 
names of some of them are on gray slabs of stone, 
and some are forgotten altogether. Did you ever see 
a rainbow die? — the sort of architecture that must be 
repaired every second, or it will crumble into atoms 
of colorless rain ? And so the drops one by one fall 
into their places, the arch changing each instant and 
always the same, until the I'ain comes slow and the 
tints grow faint and the bow goes out, and the cloud 
is as bare as if God had never put a seal to the Cove- 

AN OLD-FASHIONED " FOURTH." 

The tavern dining-room on that old Fourth was 
the scene of high festivity. The roast pig, with a 
sprig of parsley in his mouth, graced the head of the 
board. He was as much a belonging of " the day we 
celebrate " as the inedible poultry of the flag. It was 



184 SUMMER-SAVORY. 

pig and patriotism. Before that pig sat the president 
of the day, blossomed ont, as to his broad bosom with 
snowy ruffles, in vest of buff and coat of blue, and 
his legs being under the table his pantaloons are out 
of sight. On either hand is an old soldier of the 
Revolution, as genuine as a flint-lock: somebody who 
had seen Washington, and was a captain ; somebody 
who had fought at Bennington, and was a private. 
And after a while came the stately old toasts, un- 
changeable as the Book of Genesis, that were drank 
to the President and the People, the Armj', the Navy, 
the old Soldiers, the Ladies, and the Day. Then they 
all stood up, and drank in silence to the Dead. After 
the immemorial thirteen, they toasted each other and 
" the rest of mankind," and what with the heat of the 
day, the dinner and the toasting, they grew warm, 
while the anvil in the street grew hot, and a gun that 
had bellowed at Sachet's Harbor gave tongue, and 
the air was full of smoke and glory and Seventy-Six, 
— Seventy-Six, that had not then sunk so far below 
the horizon that the twilight splendors of the first 
Fourth of July that was thought worth mentioning, 
were not refracted still. Possibly that dinner was 
fifty cents. Probably it was free. Surely it was 
grand ! 

Out in front of the door was a grizzly drummer 
with his drum, who had beaten the long roll some- 
where, because Baron Steuben or General Stark — 
Molly's husband — told him to; and a fifer to match, 
who whistled away like a blackbird in a hedge, and 



THE COUNTRY BALL-ROOM. 185 

the boys kept step to the measure, and everybody 
marked time with head or toe or cane, and so all 
mentally marched back fifty yeai-s, when the music 
meant business. But the fife was given to grand- 
children for a plaything, and Time slashed a hole in 
the drum with a careless cut of his scythe, and the 
mice gnawed ofi" the snare, and there are two tablets, 
each with a stone willow thereon, and both tablets 
cry out with one voice: "A Patriot of the Revolu- 
tion." Sic transit gloria mandi ad immortalitatein 
— So passes the glory of the world to immortality. 
The Fourth of July has w^orn on into the deep night. 
The fifth will soon dawn. The guests are gone. The 
lights are out. The old inn is silent as an empty 
church. And so I say to the memory of the old day, 
"Out! brief candle!" 

THE FLAG REMEMBERED. 

Forty years ago flags were fewer, and so, to be 
sure, were folks. The pagans that dwelt in villages 
seldom saw any except at "General Training" and 
on the Fourth of July, and on those occasions their 
name was not legion. Not then, as now, did each 
omnibus horse sport a little flag between his ears upon 
gala days. It used to be that a boy's first sight of 
the glorious standard almost took his breath away. 
A boy's tenth-wave passion is for martial " pomp and 
circuni stance," provided he has ever seen any. Boys 
are monkeys. So much for Darwin ! 

Your first sword was forged from a shingle and 



186 SUMMER-SAVORY. 

tipped with the blood of the belligerent strawberry. 
Your first flag was made of a yard square of cotton 
cloth, that mayhap had helped to do duty upon a 
trundle-bed, and was hemmed by a mother's fingers. 
Upon it was tethered with needle and thread an eagle 
of blue broadcloth. That eagle was hatched by the 
same loving hands and the help of a pair of shears. 
It was a fowl of such proportions as Agassiz would 
have wondered over. Beside it were thirteen stars 
of blue upon a cotton-white heaven — all " deeply, 
darkly, beautifully blue," but just the thing that 
should have been cerulean. It was a defiant flag, 
for it bleached out the sky and put all the color in 
bird and stars. A disabled broom furnished the staff", 
and altogether it was the ensign of no State in the 
Union but the State of Perfect Happiness. Long 
ago, the moths devoured the eagle and the mice ate 
up the flag, and the staff" turned into legs for a milk- 
ing-stool, but the memory and the glory remain "even 
until this day." 



CHAPTER XXIY. 

A THANKSGIVING-DAY FLIGHT. 

BY invitation I rode liundreds of miles to reach 
J^ew Yorlv, for the salce of flying back to Chi- 
cago by the Fast White Mail when such things were. 
That is all there was of it. Three o'clock Thanks- 
giving morning found me riding up Broadway to the 
Grand Central Depot. 

The city had fallen asleep in her diamonds the 
night before, — the careless, magnificent creature! 
Chains of brilliants and necklaces of light and dou- 
ble rows of jewelry down every street, like double 
rows of gems along a Persian seam, fairly clothed 
her with trinkets as with a garment. She is grand 
when she goes to bed as a princess going to Court. 
But New York sleeps with one eye open. The mantle 
of slumber is as short as a Scotch kilt, and the cloak 
of forgetfulness shrinks to a jacket when she puts it 
on. Nowhere else in America is a man reduced from 
an integer to a pitiful vulgar fraction as he is in 
New York. He sees himself through the other end 
of the glass; he shrivels like a last year's filbert; 
he wonders the census-taker cares to reckon him in, 
the three-ninths of a man that he has become. That 

187 



188 SUMMER-SAVORY. 

feeling of fragmentary humanity and loneliness proves, 
without the help of mathematics, that a mart has 
achieved genuine greatness. Boston is Athenian ; Bal- 
timore is monumental ; Philadelphia is centennial ; 
Chicago is wonderful, but New York is New York. 

" THE WORD GO." 

Not a minute too soon, we found the White Mail 
just ready to leave. It had an unreal, a spectral look 
in the flicker of the lamps, and so had the white 
four-in-hand, attached to the ponderous wagon, whence 
the last of the mail-bags were tumbling into the cars. 
It was a scene for lamplight and starlight rather than 
for broad day. Number 84, the engineer in the saddle, 
was ready to run, and, as the clock marked fifteen 
minutes past four, the conductor gave the word "go," 
and we went. The crew had come aboard, the en- 
gine had made ready, the driver had taken aim, and 
the conductor said " fire ! " That was how it was. 
There were four cars, four gallant governors in line, — 
their Excellencies Hendricks, Fairchild, Beveridge and 
Buckingham, — brave in their white, orange and gold, 
blazoned with shielded eagles, and gay to look at as 
so many waiting lords in the king's livery. Ah ! 
it was a Jewell of a train. 

And the first thing it did was to plunge ignobly 
into a hole two miles long, burrow like a gopher, 
and jar away under the city streets that ribbed it 
overhead like the bars of a gridiron. And the next 
thing it did was to dash across Harlem river, and 



A THAHKSGlVmG-DAY FLIGHT. 189 

tnake the switches snap like flint-locks in a skirmish, 
and set the lamp-posts about as near as a row of wax 
lights on a mantelpiece, and out it dashed as if bound 
for a plunge-bath in the Hudson. But it changed 
its mind in a minute and doubled capes of curves, 
and thundered under the hills, threw lights on the 
water, and glimmers on the rock, and glares on the 
rail. It swung like a cradle and shot like an arrow, 
and whipped through the tunnels as if it were stitch- 
ing for life, with Starvation's ivory grin looking in 
at the door. Figures started out in the flash of the 
head-light as we rounded a promontory, and slunk 
back in the darkness like guilty things as we passed. 
The train ran as light and swift, with its thirty-five 
tons of mail, as a rejoicing herald that used to run 
before the king. It cleft the shadows that lay heaped 
upon the track, as if Night had disrobed, left its 
clothes upon the rails, and gone into the river to 
swim ; ghosts of precipices and doubles of trees and 
mantles of mountaitis. The furnace door played like 
a fan in a fever. The clouds above the engine turned 
white and crimson and black every two minutes. It 
was a medley of sunsets and midnights. It seemed 
like flying, and had we heard the flap of a pair of 
wings as big as a mainsail close to our ears, and 
the Governors had all left the track in a flock and 
flown, not into the ditch, but over the Palisades or 
"Wolfert's Roost, or the Catskills, or the bridge of 
Anthony's nose, it would have astonished nobody 
very much. 



190 SUMMER-SAVORY. 

We had strung a dozen villages as nimble girls 
string beads, when day broke and the sun touched up 
the wavy skj^-line of the mountains, and Father Hud- 
son showed himself, icy at the edges like the tips of 
an old man's ears and fingers in a frosty morning, but 
traveling seaward as sturdil}^ as Sir Hendrick saw him 
many a year ago. Now we caught one steamer with 
the steady see-saw of her walking-beam, and showed 
her a light pair of heels in three seconds ; and now we 
met another with a brood of barges about her like a 
hen with a small family of exaggerated Bramahs; and 
now a pair of schooners wing and wing like a couple 
of gulls. The villages across the river kept dressing 
to the right, like a row of school-children ranged for 
a spelling-match, as we flew. The engine was inces- 
santly giving two little whistles to itself, as it cleft 
hamlet, highway and hill, and the bell swung like a 
pendulum with a tongue in it, and we pulled up at 
Poughkeepsie. The wheels tolled along under the 
train at the blow of the testing hammers before we 
fairly halted ; five minutes and we were away. It is 
the most penurious train on the road. It puts eighty 
minutes into sixteen little packages for its sixteen halts 
in a thousand miles, and it doles out these five-minute 
nickels one at a time along the way. 

THE FLIGHT. 



It was a splendid day. The sun shone like an 
Easter sun. It was Thanksgiving. And to think 
that we were making the transit of six States before 



A THANKSGIVIISTG-DAY FLIGHT. 191 

men should begin to say, " Yesterday was Thanks- 
giving;" — that New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, In- 
diana, Michigan, Illinois, should slip away beneath 
the wheels like a map of sovereignties under a nimble 
finger ; — that we were gliding through an atmosphere 
of five hundred thousand turkeys done to a golden 
brown and lying like dead knights in armor, ready 
for the glad solemnities of Thanksgiving, and not so 
much as a "merry-thought" wherewith to bless our- 
selves; — that there we were, chasing a cup of coffee 
across the Empire State, telegraphing Utica from Al- 
bany and Syracuse from Utica, and catching the slow- 
footed Mercurys before they had delivered the mes- 
sage ; — calling for a drop of Java or Mocha or " peas, 
beans and barley O," through a flight of two hundred 
miles, as plaintively as aguish Caesar called for drink 
when he was in Spain ; — that we were to catch at 
Bufialo at last and have our small Thanksgiving ; — 
that we were doing the twenty-six days' work of the 
pioneers in as many hours ; — that M^e were in efi'ect 
bringing Chicago to sit by the shore of Lake Erie, 
and Buffalo to the banks of the Mohawk, and Utica 
for a neighborly gossip with the old city of the Knick- 
erbockers at tide-water, setting sober-going watches 
in the wrong and making them bear false witness 
without lying, 

GEOGEAPHY JUMBLED. 

The train takes Holland in a trice of hours and 
captures the savages in a trice more. It is Spuyten 
Duyvil, Yonkers, Sing Sing and no music; it is 



192 StrMMER-SAVORY, 

Crugers and Peekskill, Fishkill and Catskill ; it is 
Staatsburg, Rhinebeck, Germantown, Stiiyvesant, Ba- 
tavia and Amsterdam. It flashes by the sturdy Dutch- 
men a hundred years old, whose rugged walls shed 
Kevolutionary bullets and flint-headed arrows as ducks 
shed rain. 

It is Tribes Hill and Oriskany, Oneida, Canastota, 
Canaseraga, Ohittenango and White Pigeon. And 
there's your poor Indian ! It takes Rome before it 
is done with it, and rattles geography together in a 
hopeless jumble in twenty-six hours. 

"true as a die." 

Did you ever see a M-oman weave, and watch the 
play of the shuttle to and fro through the countless 
threads and never a tangle or catch? — to and fro, 
here and there, with a swing of the bar? The Hud- 
son River Railroad is a loom mightier and busier. 
See the sixty trains out of JSTew York flying hither 
and yon and keeping the rails jarring night and day 
to the music. See the scores of trains dashing out 
of the West. See them pulling into " the piece " all 
along the way. These are the threads. Then see 
the white shuttle of the Fast Mail, — white that eveiy- 
body may know it, — flashing to and fro amid the 
warp and woof of trains, never colliding or blunder- 
ing or waiting. New York throws it with a will in 
the morning and Chicago sends it back in the even- 
ing. Shuttles meet and pass and part with the accu- 
racy of the stars. 



A THANKSGIVING-DAY FLIGHT. 193 

There is a point on the New York Central between 
Batavia and a place-no-place called Croft's. The Mail 
from New York and the Mail from Chicago, nine 
hundred and eighty-six miles apart, are due there at 
the same moment, — nineteen minutes past two p.m. 
We, westward-bound, are careering at fifty-six miles an 
hour. We shall strike the point on time. Will our 
twin from the West be there to meet us? Watches 
in hand we look ahead. A cloud no bigger than a 
man's hand. It might be a fleece from Mary's little 
lamb. It grows, till it is like a ship showing every- 
thing that will draw. It is the train ! Two seven- 
teen — seventeen and a half — eighteen — a quarter — 
half — three-quarters — ninete&n ! The train is here, 
is there, is gone ! We met on the instant. It was 
an aggregate motion the trains made of one hundred 
and twelve miles an hour. It was like brushing one 
palm with the other in the twinkling of an eye. A 
man may build the great clock of Strasburg that could 
never make a time-table. 

A MILE A MINUTE HOW IT SEEMS. 

Of a truth it is a splendid day ! Engine 317, H. 
S. Shattuck, engineer, awaits us at Buffalo. He is of 
age on the rail, having been an engineer his twenty- 
one years. We climb into the howdah, and doesn't 
317 shine in her brazen harness, like the near v^^heel- 
horse of Phoebus ! She has done her mile in fifty- 
two seconds, and never " turned a hair." The engi- 
neer is as quiet as the keeper of a light-house. He 



194 SUMMEK-SAVORY. 

is not noisy. Engineers seldom are. He is reticent. 
He is not a stage-driver. He is a gunner. He says, 
"I use my ears as much as I do my eyes. I hear 
every click and clip of engine and train. If there's 
a jingle out of place anywhere, I can't heljp hearing 
it. Once I could not have heard it had I tried." 
He talks one way and looks another. He has his 
hand on the iron bridle, his eye on the track, his 
heart on the West. He sees the world bearing down 
ujDon him like a ship before a mighty wind. He 
brings his engine down to her steady work. The 
day is as calm as old Herbert's blessed Sunday, but 
the wind blows here in the saddle full fifty miles an 
hour. A couple of young hurricanes are following 
at the heels of the train. Give them a wide berth, 
or they will waltz you in upon the track to the tune 
of the devil's hornpipe. We are making a mile in 
fifty-nine seconds, fifty-eight seconds, fifty-six seconds, 
fifty-four seconds. Sheridan's ride at Read's rhyth- 
mic paces from Winchester to glory, " only twenty 
miles away," was a Sabbath-day's jog in a decorous 
way. 

The track sometimes lifts to the edge of the sky, 
and it doesn't look as if it were a very heavy grade 
to heaven either. The telegraph poles come together 
like a Y, and fence the track in the distance. The 
wires droop and swing and shorten up like clothes- 
lines to hang sheet lightning on, if you please ! The 
great steel S's of curves glitter like silver in the sun. 
The bell, shaped like the tall hats we see in pictures 



A THANKSGIVIKG-DAY FLIGHT. 195 

finishing up the Pilgrims that stand freezing round 
the rock of Plymouth, keeps on the swing, rung by 
the tireless hand of steam. The engine talks to a 
crossing, hails a station, screams at a track-man. The 
little oscillations and petty jolts disappear. The thing 
runs like a shaft in a polished groove. All minor 
motions are resolved into the one forward plunge. 
As the rifle-bullet hurries round and round and out 
of its spiral hall of steel, so speeds the train. It runs 
as true as the aim of a dead shot. The steady still- 
ness is suspicious. If you think of it and what it 
means, it tugs at your nerves and draws them taut 
as the little string of a violin. It is seventy feet at 
a clock-tick, eighty feet at a heart-beat, forty miles in 
forty-three minutes. It means that a minute makes 
a mile, when it does not mean more. Fifteen min- 
utes late is twelve miles late, and a stern chase is a 
wild chase. 

A MAN HATCHED AND EECONSIDEEED. 

There's a dor on the track about the size of a 
Darwinian primal egg. It begins to hatch ! It de- 
velops legs and arms and feet and head. It is as 
tall as a pen-holder, a walking-stick, a man. It is a 
man, and the man stands not " upon the order of his 
going," but goes at once, bolts the track and makes 
for the fence. We pass him, and behold he shuts up 
like a telescope and diminishes by swift degrees and 
rolls back into an egg, a dot, a nothing. The track 
is clear behind us for all such animalculse as he. It 
is as if he had never been hatched at all ! 



196 SUMMER-SAVORY. 

The talk of engineer, fireman, conductor, brake- 
man, is " speed." Watches are in hand, and mile- 
posts read like a book. No vain girl with a pretty 
face ever consulted her looking-glass so often as are 
the time-pieces on the train, and it isn't the hour 
hand they are after, but the minutes and the seconds. 
Under the wheels of a fifty-six miler time is ground 
exceeding small, and it takes a finger as delicate as a 
second hand to pick it up. Speed has a head on it. 
It is exhilarating as sparkling Catawba. It quickens 
pulses and lifts the spirits. It is the very antipodes 
of death, for the swiftest motion is the intensest life. 

We have done our thousand miles between sun 
and sun, our Thanksgiving- day flight is finished, and 
w^e say to ourself, as we leap from the train, with 
some grateful feeling befitting the day we had spent 
in flying, 

Chicago! and we kept the track 1 

And what have they all done in the twenty-six 
hours ? Scattered to the four winds, and precisely 
where they belong, 157,000 papers, 119,420 letters, — 
276,420 pieces in all, and an average of 9,214 to the 
man, — the work of thirty-five men in a round day! 

Chicago, six fifty-five, twenty-six hours from New 
York, and a cloudy morning ! The waiting trains are 
in harness. It is Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Wisconsin, 
the Silver State, the Golden State, the Picket Post 
of Civilization. On rush the tidings. It is Green 
Bay before bed-time. It is Dubuque before sundown. 
The old fifty-eight hours from Boston to Burlington 



A THAKKSGIVING-DAY FLIGHT. 197 

are forty-five. The old seven days to San Francisco 
are fused into a bright new six, and a Sabbath to 
spare ! Where are the people that bade each other 
good-by, as for a lasting farewell, when the mail was 
chucked into the. boot of the Concord coach at Chi- 
cago, and trod upon by the driver and lurched away 
to Galena for ninety-six hours? 

Eloquence may be gi'and, but this is grander. Poet- 
ry may be fine, but this is finer still. War may be 
glorious, but there is no blood on the white array of 
the Governors' Train. It has swung through an arc 
of nine hundred and eighty-five miles. It has trav- 
ersed twenty cities with an aggregate population of 
two millions. It has flashed along a great highway 
bordered with half a million more who are within 
stone's throw or ear-shot of its lively wheels. It was 
the pendulum of the new Centennial Clock sweeping 
six States at a vibration. 



CHAPTEE XXY. 

"RIVERSIDE" AND "LAKESIDE." 

AMERICA has a lake and a river that are classic. 
-JLJL The one is the Hudson, and the other, Otsego. 
If anybody thinks there should be more, let him 
make more, and no man shall forbid him. Happily 
Washington Irving and Fennimore Cooper were eld- 
est sons, and so heirs to whatever of literary name 
and fame was worth inheriting. They had no rivals 
and few imitators. They entered into peaceable pos- 
session when the world was less troubled with angels 
than it now is, — the angels that are incessantly saying 
" Write ! " 

Born fifty years later, they would have been anach- 
ronisms, and might about as well have not been born 
at all. The world grows more difficult to be caught 
every day of its life, but there is a chance for the 
man who is born too soon. The quick world may 
overtake him and honor him with a monument, 
though it has quite forgotten where he was buried. 
That coroners can hold an inquest upon departed 
merit, without having a lody to sit upon, is a blessed 
thing for printers and marble-workers and everything 
but the departed merit. Few are they who, like Pro- 
fessor Morse, witness the unveiling of their own statues. 



"riverside" and "lakeside," 199 

In this, Cooper and Irving were alike: both loved 
England filially — faithfully. The one bestowed upon 
her his benedictions ; the other was as much an 
Islander as he could be in the heart of a continent. 
Both were insular in their tastes. They would have 
been contehted with an asteroid if they could have 
taken the choicest of this great lumbering earth with 
them ; if they could have had at command a small 
marine to carry their manuscripts to the mainland. 
They were neither sordid nor selfish, but then they 
did not like to be jostled. 

It is not long since Irving's Sketch-Book and 
Cooper's Leather-Stocking were in everybody's hand, 
when " everybody " meant less and more than it means 
now ; less, because readers were fewer ; more, because 
the few read as the saints are charged to sing, " with 
the spirit and the understanding also." How Smith 
would fare to-dav as the author of Irving's Broken 
Heart, or what publisher would be gracious to Jones, 
author of Cooper's Pioneers, is a curious inquiry. 
Whether the Ledge7\ wherein Henry Ward Beecher 
writes a hay-fever serial, would accept them, or yet 
any magazine yield them a place with The Luck of 
Roaring Camp, is not certain. Let us give the men 
of Lakeside and Riverside the benefit of the doubt. 

Among the ways of estimating literary fame are 
the time-table and long measure. An exemplary dog 
ordinarily lives longer than a book. Twelve years is 
a great while in the ephemeral generations of print, 
and the Methuselahs are rare. A work that can stand 



200 SUMMER-SAVORY. 

the ravages of a century, and then come up some- 
where in a man's path like a fresh flower in the 
spring, and brighten his way and gladden his heart, 
and with human nature enough in it to live another 
hundred, has achieved a fame that men agree to call 
immortality, — a sort of infant immortality in swad- 
dling bands. 

As a rule, a popular writer appears greater and 
grander at a thousand miles than he does at your 
elbow. He looms. The eagerness of people to sub- 
ject a favorite to the damaging microscope of daily 
observation almost always brings its own punishment 
in one idol less and more bits of broken pottery. The 
paths of some, to-day, are as rough with them as the 
road to Jordan. Death and distance are great illu- 
sionists, and many a man owes the glamour of hia 
fame to one or the other, and for the same reason, — 
it keeps him out of sight. 

But why these dealings with the dead? Are there 
not livelier, fresher themes going? The works of 
Irving and Cooper have long since taken their allot- 
ted places in the world of letters. Brave in turkey 
and gilding they are drawn up in thousands of glit- 
tering lines; a little more like Joseph, perhaps, with 
the strange king upon the throne who knew him 
not; a little more dust upon them, a little oftener, 
than there was twenty j^ears ago ; but Mdiat matters 
it? When the fine wines in the cob-webbed bottles 
come, up from the bin, there is a hrnsh with the cork- 
screw ready to your hand. The amber, the crimson, 



"riverside" and '-lakeside." 201 

and the golden set themselves aright, and show the 
drowned sunshine all the same. So, the delicate 
touch, the apt word, the finished English, the quaint 
and quiet humor of Irving, are still there. The salty 
breeze of Cooper's sea-stories has not lost its savor. 
Natty Bumppo, Leatherstocking, Hawkeye, the Scout, 
the Pathfinder, the Trapper, — the many-sided man 
of Otsego, — yet counts five in the roll of manhood. 

And this is wh}'. October has a thoughtful way 
with it. Pansies should be born in October. The 
woods, trying to remember the colored splendors of 
the going year, have taken fire, and yet are uncon- 
sumed. Maple, poplar, beech and ash tell the story, 
every one in its own way, and thus it is that tliere 
are "tongues in trees." With their dying leaves 
they repeat the marigolds. They suggest the blush- 
roses. They rehearse the summer-sunsets. October 
is a good time for a pilgrimage, and I have just made 
one to Cooperstown. What you can find in a geo- 
graphy or a tourist's guide, or anybody's Field Book 
of anything, cannot be found here. 

Striking out by an unwonted route from Richfield 
Springs, where people drink disagreeable water and 
fan themselves all summer, twelve miles to Coopers- 
town as the crow flies, if he flies straight, you pass 
little hamlets you never heard of, noted on the map 
with a fly-speck of a dot, as Cooperstown might liave 
been but for Cooper and his ci'eations. There is 
something breezy about hills, even when no wind 
is blowing. They suggest billows, 



202 SUMMER-SAVORY. 

As long ago as I hid "The Last of the Mohicans" 
under the fat copy of Yirgil spread open before me 
in school-time, — Yirgil, with a blessed '"'• Ordo'''' run- 
ning down the edge of the text, the clew of the 
labyrinth to take a fellow through the dove-tail ter- 
minations out into English light and Latin sense, — 
before that, Cooperstown was a Mecca to me, — and 
not to me only, but to thousands. I fancied it was 
about a mile from the Celestial Gate, and stored with 
countless wealth. Thence came the books of birds 
and beasts, the blessed primers thin as gold leaf and 
quite as precious, — "price one cent;" "price two 
cents ; " " price six cents." But, ah ! the last M^as 
magnificence, at the cost of a Spanish sixpence, the 
scale from a little silver fish that had been mentally 
taken to pieces ever so often, resolved into cents, 
reduced to mills, and there they were, all rounded 
into the small flake from the white mines of Peru ! 
Since then I have spent delighted hours before Audu- 
bon's Book of Birds, as it leaned up against the wall 
like a pier-glass. Had the partridge began to drum, 
nobody could have wondered. But never did that 
wondrous mimicry of nature give me half the joy 
that one of those bits of blue-covered primers did, 
with the imprint, " II. & E. Phinney." And here, a 
while ago, I was riding into Cooperstown in the 
October sunshine of a j)erfect day, and, passing along 
the street, an ancient landmark of a store caught my 
eye, and across its front was a wooden sign, like a 
railway passenger with his ticket in his hat-band, and 



"eiverside" and "lakeside." 203 

the words upon it were familiar as a nursery rhyme. 
It was as if somebody you had thought dead full 
forty years ago should meet you with the old greeting. 
The sign was "in words and letters following, to 
wit " : H. & E, Phinney. The pack of care and 
time I had been carrying tumbled off in an instant, 
like Christian Pilgrim's knapsack of sin, and again 
I was the beatified master of a silver sixpence. This 
was the place, then, whither the jingling treasures in 
the pockets of my blue-striped trousers found their 
way, and whence, in the old time, came those thin- 
leaved tracts of boyish happiness ! The modern stores, 
the fine old mansions, the grand hotels, all faded out 
like a mirage, and, for the moment, nothing remained 
of Cooperstown but the old sign. 

We passed an ancient church-yard, where, like lambs 
around the door, stood the white tablets of the fore- 
fathers. But the slabs leaned hither and thither, as 
if they would lay the heavy emphasis of marble Italics 
upon human forgetfulness. And there lies the dust 
of the novelist ! The living world has closed around 
the disused acre, but I had found the resting-place of 
him with whom, many a year ago, by the magic of 
his story, I had wandered in the wilderness ; who 
had halted my heart many a time in hours of mystery 
and danger ; had quickened it to exultation in the 
triumphing right, and inspired me with a love for 
American scenery by forest and prairie, by valley and 
mountain ; with an admiration for American purpose 
and prowess everywhere, that have never perished. His 



204 SUMMER-SAVORY. 

pictures were appeals for things noble and lovely, and 
of good report. He suggested no evil. He mossed 
over no wrong. In all English-speaking lands he 
compelled recognition of the truth that an American 
could write an American novel, that, owing nothing 
to the old world, should spring as naturally from the 
soil as the elms and pines of Otsego. A gay and 
gilded omnibus rattled by, blazoned with Hotel Fen- 
NiMOEE. Italics and great capitals, — weeds unrebuked 
and the pride of life, " So runs the world away ! " 

The last trace of the old Cooper mansion is oblit- 
erated. Fire began it. Innovation completed it. 
Nothing remains but to sow it with salt. The classic 
grounds have been virtually slashed with a public 
street, as a saber-stroke seams and disfigures a noble 
face, and houses stand about, and look foolishly at each 
other, as if they were ashamed of it. Even some of 
the old ancestral trees, they say, have been deemed 
cumberers of the ground, and have gone up sooty 
kitchen-chimneys in smoke. Nothing of all this is 
half so wonderful as where the willing hands were 
folded, that the spot was not rescued from ob- 
livion ; and where the taste had vanished that would 
have made a Leatherstocking Park, and thronged it 
with the creations of Cooper's genius ; embodied his 
characters in marble and bronze, civilized, savage and 
sailor, the red, white and blue of his stories, and 
deeded it all to the people forever. 

Then we crossed a picturesque ravine, and wound 
along the base of the wooded hills, Otsego's classic 



"riverside" ajstd "lakeside." 205 

water at the left, turned golden wine in the descend- 
ing sun ; and, terrace above terrace, the city of the 
silent at the right. The very water where the canoes 
of the wilderness glided with an arrow's silence. The 
very eity where, among the sighing pines, and the 
flickering shadows blown about upon the ground and 
spotted with fallen leaves by October winds, Cooper's 
monument stands forth. It is an eloquent piece of 
work. Eloquent, not so much in what is graven. as 
in what is left unsaid. ISTo word but Cooper. E"o 
name his mother called him by. No date of birth or 
death. Why should there be ? In everything that 
makes true living he is not dead. Leatherstocking, in 
his fringed hunting-suit and' frowzy cap, — as classic, 
every whit, as the robe of the Roman, — his faithful 
friends, the dog and rifle, bearing company, surmount 
the shaft. Emblems of Cooper's works by ship and 
shore emboss the monument with brief biography. 
The word Otsego had a meaning once, of salutation 
and honor. The red-man's courtesy is in order to-day, 
and so let me say, Otsego to Cooper ! 

Miles of hill and dale lay between us and rest; the 
sun was going down, and taking one look more at 
lake and hill and sky and monument I turned silently 
away. I had come on a pilgrimage to what men call 
the Dead. Eating salt at no man's table, entering no 
abode of the living, welcomed by none, I left Coopers- 
town, and befoi'e many miles were made, night fell 
down upon all the hills. 



OHAPTEE XXYI. 

CHECKS. 
THE CONDUCTOe's CHECK. 

WRITING of checks: I was a passenger on the 
Cincinnati and Sandusky raih'oad, where the 
conductor gives no check, but takes your ticket, looks 
you over for a second and passes on. It is a great 
comfort all around. It saves you the annoyance of a 
conductor's feeling about for some place to stick a 
label, red, white, blue, or yellow as a daisy, as if you 
were a package of goods consigned to somebody. It 
always gives me a bit of spiteful satisfaction when 
the conductor finds a hat without any band, or a band 
stitched so snugly that he cannot embellish it with 
a check. It delights me to see him give little jabs 
with his parallelogram of pasteboard around that hat's 
equator without finding a place to put it, and then 
irritably hand it to the passenger with a gesture of 
expostulation. 

Did you ever watch a woman look for her check 
when the conductor demands it? She has no hat- 
band, thank fortune and fashion ! but what to do with 
it is a conundrum. She holds the representative of 
money paid and miles to ride in her hand a little 
while. Then, tired of that, she wedges it between her 

206 



CHECKS. 207 

glove and the palm of her hand ; or she puts it in 
her portemonnaie or her reticule or her lunch-basket 
or her bandbox or her pocket. If very primitive, she 
thrusts it in her bosom or knots it up in a corner of 
her handkerchief, as old grandmothers used to tie up 
their money. Perhaps she gives it to the baby for 
amusement, and the youngster plays paper-mill with 
half of it. She sticks it in a crack of the window 
for security, and it slips down upon the floor. She 
steps out into the aisle, adjusts her skirts, and makes 
a dip and a plunge under the seat for it. Rescued, 
she impales it with a pin upon the side of the car, 
and it jai-s out into her lap in a mile. She catches 
it, and gropes for her basket, overturns a sandwich, 
two pickles, a stratum of cheese and a doughnut, and 
deposits it in the very bottom of the geological forma- 
tions. That miserable bit of paper is the most trouble- 
some of all her possessions. 

She is glad it is an " Indian gift," that the con- 
ductor did not present it to her outright, that he will 
relieve her of it in due time, but by-and-by she is 
sorry she was glad. There he stands, and he wants 
that check. She has forgotten what she did with it! 
She nervously examines her portemonnaie, she over- 
hauls h-er reticule, she feels in her glove, her pocket, 
her bosom. She wishes the conductor wouldn't watch 
her. - She could find it quicker if he only wouldn't. 
At last she unearths it from the big basket, smelling 
of vinegar and cheese and nutcakes, and stained with 
a drop of jelly, like " the damned spot " upon the 



208 SUMMER- SAVORY. 

little hand of Shakespeare's monster, Lady Macbeth, 
that would not " out," and presents it with a sigh of 
^relief to the impatient official. Nibbled at one end 
and soiled at the other, he tears it in three pieces, 
and hastens along; and the woman wonders why upon 
earth he troubled her to keep it, when he didn't want 
it himself. 

Yonder is a yonng woman who has traveled. She 
pins the check upon her shawl the minute she gets 
it, like an order of nobility, and thinks no more about 
it. She does not care the pin that holds it whether 
the conductor ever gets it or not. All the timid 
women and the elderly women envy her. Here is a 
man who consigns that check to his tin tobacco-box, 
and snaps the cover together with a click. Unhappy 
is he whose check the conductor took from his hat- 
band while he nodded, as even Homer is said to do; 
taken as was the rib from Adam, but with no hope 
of a recompense so pleasant as Eve. He wakens with 
a start, throws up a hand, instinctively to .his hat, for 
he knows he has been "in the land of Nod," feels 
nothing, whips off the castor, and gives it three com- 
plete revolutions before he is convinced that the check 
has utterly gone, and then falls to searching in all his 
pockets and around the neighborhood, glances suspi- 
ciously at its inhabitants to see who took it, gives 
the hat another hopeless twirl, and then waits help- 
lessly for the conductor that never comes back, and 
so the passenger escapes safely from the car at his 
destination, ignorant what became of that check. 



CHECKS. 209 

THE BANK CHECK. 

Of all checks bank checks are the pleasantest. Al- 
most every boy has written out one of them for a mill- 
ion or so, ujDon the Bank of Nowhere, and put his name 
to it just to see how it would look. I wonder how 
a man feels who can fill in a slip of paper with such 
words and figures, to wit, as " ten thousand dollars — 



,000," and have some paying teller wet his fingers 
and count them out the minute it is presented. It 
must be a warming sort of sensation, like a mustard- 
plaster applied to a cold place. Is that why wealthy 
men are called "warm"? 

Girls never do that. They never write make-be- 
lieve checks, for they hope to live till somebody pens 
genuine checks for them, and saves them the trouble 
and the — expense. 

Are you ever made game of by autograph-hunters? 
Do they come at you with a pen, a pocket-inkstand 
with a screw cover, and a narrow book containing 
everybody's name "his mother called him by"? Are 
you an impecunious poet or a peripatetic lecturer, or 
something of that sort? If you are, then you have. 
That putting your signature to nothing is a flattering 
business before twenty-five and a stupid one after two- 
score. The writer hopes the reader's name is not 
found in many autograph albums, belaureled, bedoved 
and beharped on the cov^ers, and gilt-edged, like 
Orange county butter, because, as a rule, you don't 
find a name good for much on a bank-check flourish- 
ing in an album. Whether or not it is because the 
9* 



210 SUMMER-SAVORY. 

owner is afraid somebody will steal the autograph 
and put it where " it will do the most good," I can- 
not tell. 

It must be pleasant to be able to make a check. 
It is something like earning the money, and then issu- 
ing the currency yourself. I am not quite sure it 
would not be a luxury to put a dollar into some bank 
just for the sake of checking it out. But there is 
always a time in a man's life, and it is not in the 
beginning of it, when these slips of paper, even with 
seven figures on them besides the pair for cents, look 
microscopically worthless, and that is when, in lan- 
guage' more current than classic, he is summoned " to 
pass in his checks " ; when the word is " checkmate ! " 
and the end comes. A man has recently gone who 
could have drawn a check that would have bought 
Louisiana at its old price, and fenced Khode Island, 
and filled a great State with homes for the poor, and 
founded a great library. He dealt in hot water, boil- 
ing water, winged water, all his days, and steamed 
with unparalleled swiftness to a fortune so stupen- 
dous that he reckoned his life not by years, but by 
millions. He checked out a church and a university 
as if they had been trifles. But then he was a long 
time on the track. He bought and sold speed as if 
it were a commodity, but he could not " make time " 
himself. 

TRUNK CHECKS. 

There is a jingle as of dull bells, and a man enters 
the car, dragging after him a frame hung wath geog- 



CHECKS. 211 

rapliy tumbled to pieces, picked up, graven upon bits 
of brass, and hung upon leather straps. And the 
man says, '■^ Chech y'r baggage ! " Your thought climbs 
a flight of garret stairs somewhere, and stands by a 
little calfskin trunk with the hair on, and your name 
lettered with brass nails on the cover, " A. B. C." 
That was all the check anybody had thirty years ago^ 
Fancy a man — fancy two hundred men — looking for 
"A. B. C." in a through baggage-car ! Put a brass 
ornament on that home-body of a trunk, and, calf as 
it is, it will reveal powers of going abroad that are 
marvelous. It will travel like a thing with brains, 
in a sort of intelligent manner, from Maine to the 
Florida reefs, and there you will find it waiting for 
you, chafed as to its epidermis, weak and jingling of 
a hinge, perhaps, but then there. 

How many men have themselves checked through 
a line of policy, regardless of friends, foes or conse- 
quences ! Put brazen labels on their heresies and set 
them going! 

BLUE CHECK. 

In Ohio I saw a girl in a span-clean checked 
apron that went around her waist with a string; 
the old-fashioned sort, made of numberless and un- 
divided checker-boards, with the little blue and white 
squares alternating with mathematical precision. The 
sight of that apron would have taken you back to 
an older wearer of a similar garment, who brought 
apples from the orchard in it, and white maple-chips 
from the woodpile, and picked peas in it upon a 



212 StJMMEll-SAVORY. 

pinch, and gathered eggs in it from the haymow^, 
and spread it smoothly and decorously over her lap 
when she sat, and her knitting-work reposed in it; 
and sometimes a cat, marked like her best Sunday 
comb, would assay a slumber uj)on its checkered 
existence, and be whisked oiF in a second. You have 
seen that apron flung over its owner's liead like 
"the knitted cloud" of modern times, when she 
went to the next neighbor's. That apron has wiped 
away the tears of your childish sorrow, when they 
ran down your face, and your clamorous tongue ran 
out at each corner of your mouth between the sylla- 
bles of lamentation and licked them in! You see 
where she laid it when its work was done. You saw 
where they laid her when her work was done. 
There is a whole system of mnemonics in those blue 
and white checks. 

"check." 

So says the reader who has come bravely on to 
this paragraph, and check it is. 

©heck! 



